1. …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him: They’ve Got Something to Lose
Feraco
Search for Human Potential
7 May 2012

2. That year was lost to him
That year was lost to him. At times he tried to remember and, just about when he thought everything was clearing up some, he would be at a loss for words. It almost always began with a dream in which he would suddenly awaken and then realize that he was really asleep. Then he wouldn’t know whether what he was thinking had happened or not.
It always began when he would hear someone calling him by his name but when he turned his head to see who was calling, he would make a complete turn and there he would end up – in the same place. This was why he never could discover who was calling him nor why. And then he even forgot the name he had been called.
One time he stopped at mid-turn and fear suddenly set in. He realized that he had called himself. And thus the lost year began.
He tried to figure out when that time he had come to call “year” had started. He became aware that he was always thinking and thinking and from this there was no way out. Then he started thinking about how he never thought and this was when his mind would go blank and he would fall asleep. But before falling asleep he saw and heard many things…

3. What his mother never knew was that every night he would drink the glass of water that she left under the bed for the spirits.
She always believed that they drank the water, and so she continued doing her duty.
Once he was going to tell her, but then he thought he’d wait and tell her when he was grown up.

4. What would you do – what have you done – for your loved ones?
What would you give if giving meant you could help them?
What would you take from them if you knew they were willing to give it?
“In a book that’s so small, so readable, and so poetic, there are…many, many very deep, philosophical, theological issues. And it’s fun to deal with them.”
Nicolás Kanellos
“There’s a lot of beautiful poetry in Tomás Rivera’s novel, you’ll find. You know, even though it’s a very harsh experience that the book conveys – you know, pain, suffering, the sun bearing down on the people as they're working – there are moments that are refreshing, and inspiring, like little fleeting swirls of beauty. Like, for example, when [the child] goes out into the silvery night. It is magical.
Evangelina Vigil-Piñón

5. …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him defies conventional analysis, in part because it’s a deeply unconventional book.
It consists of twenty-seven stories, including the two framing sections (“The Lost Year” and “Under the House”) that comprise its beginning and ending.
Together, they form what Ramon Saldivar calls “a major document of Chicano social and literary history.”
The term “Chicano” – as in “Chicano literature” – refers to Americans of Mexican descent.
Rivera was born in Crystal City, TX; his parents, both native to Mexico, were migrant workers.
“Many Mexicans and Chicanos provide labor for farmers throughout the United States, particularly in the West and Midwest. The work is seasonal, exhausting, and pays very low wages…Many migrant workers still toil under oppressive conditions similar to those experienced by the [characters] in Rivera's novel.”
-paraphrased from Annenberg

6. Also paraphrased from Annenberg: one of the reasons for the influx of Mexican and Chicano laborers in the American Southwest was the Bracero Program, which took place in 1942.
In order to fill the gaps in the labor market left behind by a huge drain on manpower (most workers having been sent away to fight in World War II), the American and Mexican governments jointly instituted a set of labor laws intended to provide fair treatment for Mexican nationals recruited to work in the United States.
While these laborers were, in part, taking the place of workers sent to the front, the program didn’t protect the workers fully, and they were often exploited.
In the meantime, many workers brought their families with them, having and/or raising children stateside.
When the Bracero Program expired, the workers were allowed to stay, but the program’s meager protections no longer applied – leaving behind a cheap, easily-abused source of labor that was meant to fill jobs now being taken by returning soldiers but ended up largely in fields and farms, taking whatever work they could in order to provide for their families.

7. …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him is a response to certain realities of Chicano and migrant life – the difficulty of defining yourself when you feel like you don’t belong anywhere, the complicated morality of an insecure existence – and the result of them as well.
Rivera focuses particularly closely on the lives of Chicanos serving as migrant agricultural workers during World War II and up through the 1960s.
It was one of only a few novels in print about Chicanos in this country at the time (late ‘60s/early ’70s).
Because Rivera largely preceded the larger Chicano literary movement (helping to inspire it, actually), he was basically writing in a vacuum – without a novelistic or fictional tradition to orient himself.

8. From Nicolás Kanellos: “From a literary point of view…this is a very, very sophisticated book. Not only is it poetic, not only is the language poetic, but also the devices of plot construction and perspective are very, very highly literary and belong to the new novel.
They belong to what people have assumed is the Latin American boom, where the reader is expected to construct the narrative.
So there are all kinds of clues in the book that lead the reader to piece together who is speaking at what time, what it means, what are the relationships of the characters, so this becomes somewhat of an artistic literary puzzle.

9. Many people have called this the Chicano Grapes of Wrath.
And the same kinds of historical background that tell us about the Dust Bowl, and what John Steinbeck documented through The Grapes of Wrath is here. We have that background.
And, in fact, not only do we have that background historically, we have it today. Because all of these issues, and all of these trends in immigration, and farm labor, and unionizing labor, and poor schooling for migrant workers – and for poor kids – still exist in this country.

10. Tomás Rivera had been writing before the official Chicano movement got underway (which historians and scholars place around 1965), when Cesar Chavez organized farm workers in California, and tried to unionize them.
Along with that unionizing came the birth of the El Teatro Campesino, with Luis Valdez, who very much developed a farm worker theater and took it around the country and popularized this new kind of literature that used the language of the people.
It also had a political message along with the civil rights movement and protests against Vietnam.”

11. While he drew on the traditions Kanellos just mentioned, it’s important to remember that Rivera was breaking new ground here.
As he wrote …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1967–1968), other Chicano writers and artists were finding expression for their ideas and opinions.
Production of art and literature exploded into a full-fledged movement (which, one could argue, means that Rivera’s book accomplished its task).

12. The Chicano renaissance – later dubbed El Movimiento – questioned accepted truths and focused on civil rights, labor struggles, and the Vietnam War (a conflict that brought issues of class and race within the armed forces to the public’s attention).
Chicano poets were among the first to gain prominence in the movement because the verse nature of their work allowed them to easily recite their writing before groups of students and workers, and they wrote bilingually in order to reach a wide audience; Rivera promoted Chicano authors and contributed to the development of the new literary tradition.

13. Thus …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him stands at the intersection of a ton of cultural, social, class, and literary concerns.
The changing cultural climate and social consciousness of the United States during the turbulent post-war period gave rise to the world Rivera describes in his stories.
Rivera’s own life – bouncing from school to school, moving from town to town as his parents “followed the work” – gave him the material for those stories.
And El teatro campesino and el movimiento helped define the way Rivera told them.

14. That narrative style, so distinctly “Rivera” at the time, tends to be one of the aspects of Rivera’s work that people struggle with most at first.
The narrative isn’t expository (based on detailed linear and realistic explanations), as it’s based more on sensory impressions and subjective descriptions.
Within this new narrative framework, conventions that we’ve grown accustomed to – linear chronological development of a plot, for example – fall away.
This means you get snapshots of dialogue and thoughts / perceptions rather than a traditional “story.”
Although this is like the stream-of-consciousness writing popularized by Virginia Woolf and the other Modernists around the time of the first World War, Rivera’s style, fragmentation (very appropriate considering his material), represents an evolution of the form.

15. However, this isn’t to say that Rivera abandons plot and convention entirely; the structure alternates between tales with titles and vignettes that pick up in media res, and every story with a title has a definite, distinct plot and narrative style.
Rivera also experiments with different voices throughout the novel; stories will alternate between female and male perspectives, between omniscient external narrators and claustrophobia-inducing first-person viewpoints.
Without giving too much away, the scene at the end in Under the House is just amazing from a writing standpoint.

16. Rivera can swim between narrative perspectives because the text is undeniably based on people Rivera met, stories he heard, and – yes – his own experiences.
Rivera: “I saw a lot of suffering and much isolation of the people. Yet they lived through the whole thing, perhaps because they had no choice. I saw a lot of heroic people and I wanted to capture their feelings.”
Kanellos: “Some try to see in this book a biography of Tomás Rivera. Well, [like] any author, Tomás Rivera included incidents from his life, characters from his life are woven, but in no way was this a biography…He knew that he was constructing something that was in the mainstream of avant-garde literature at the time that he was writing. And he saw the world that way. So it was in no way an autobiography. The main character is not Tomás. It's a broad interpretation of the struggles of migrant workers, Mexican Americans, other ethnic groups that need to find themselves in a minority culture. It has epic dimensions…”

17. Rivera writes about the people – la gente –and the book is clearly influenced by oral traditions (the practice of passing along knowledge and entertainment through direct human interaction, face to face).
This concentration on multiple voices helps to connect the novel to the traditions we mentioned earlier.
It also emphasizes that the book is about a community (and communal experience) rather than a traditional protagonist / antagonist pairing.
The effect, oddly enough, is akin to a Tralfamadorian novel fused with Beowulf: we cross space and time, peering into a bunch of different lives and stories, seeing each one as it lies only to get a completely different, more profound view when we step back and look at the whole mountain range.

18. This is clear from the first story, “The Lost Year.”
The larger novel itself is framed by the opening and closing sections, in which we are aware of a young boy who has lost everything.
It’s a deeply confusing opening for most people, mainly because it’s not clear who the boy is or what he represents…but it’s one of those very English-y openings where it’s clear he represents something.

19. As for the tales and vignettes between the framing stories, they take place in seemingly unrelated places and unspecified points in time.
These stories allegorically depict twelve months’ (one year’s) worth of collective migrant experiences – and the novel serves as a communal history, covering the lives, loves, and losses of oft-forgotten men and women.
In other words, the framing story isn’t that important in its own right – it’s important because it relates the rest of the book to itself, and the beginning makes much more sense once you’ve read the ending.

20. The novel is deeply concerned with exploitation, injustice, and oppression, whether it be economic, social, or spiritual in nature.
As a result, …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him also functions as a memorial to, and reconstitution of, the “forgotten history of a people’s oppression and struggles” – and as an eruption of America’s suppressed political unconscious.
As alluded to before, the novel was written during the organization of the United Farm Movement in California and the Chicano Civil Rights Movement.
There are tons of allegorical references to the farm workers’ movement, coming out of the fields and shadows as invisible labor, demanding their place in the sun.

21. In many ways, the collection of stories in this book are about gaining, re-gaining, or losing something – whether it’s identity, faith, or hope.
The boy represents the developing Chicano/migrant community – lacking self-awareness, struggling to understand itself through experience, unaware of its power.
This is a community in search of its identity; it needs an idea of what that is.
The book is about that struggle to understand; if the boy can begin to remember what he has forgotten, perhaps the community can come together in solidarity – and protect one another in a world that too often abuses them.

22. The narrator in “The Lost Year” is stripped of subject and identity, born into a world of absence and loss, as Saldivar puts it.
He must attempt to rediscover his name, and to recover the events that compose un año perdido, the lost year.
He begins the novel with no sense of name or place; he calls out and tries to listen without realizing that he is the one trying to speak.
He is not even sure whether he is awake or dreaming – unsure of who he is or what he is experiencing.
What is the Chicano/migrant experience? This novel attempts to help define it.
If the child can remember, he – and the community – can gain self-awareness.
As a result, we as readers are asked to examine the relationship between individuality and collectivity.

23. What’s fascinating about this community is the real way in which solidarity can help protect people – can help them survive – in a world that refuses to care for or help them; this community will form because the people need it to form.
They’re in a position where they’ve already lost just about everything, and every day is simply a struggle to avoid losing the rest.
So much is lost over the course of …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him – lives, innocence, faith – that the book can feel almost oppressive at times.
But that’s somewhat the point – there isn’t really an escape for the migrant workers and families, at least not one provided by the outside world.
If they want to change their lives, change their fates, they need to come together and agitate for change.
Only through the help of others can we hope to save ourselves – and only through our connections to others, to the world, can we become truly self-aware.

24. Now that we understand Rivera’s intentions, the story doesn’t seem so confusing
Boy = Chicano migrant community
Year = Sense of shared experiences and heritage
Call/Name = Community searching for its identity and purpose; first steps towards self-awareness
Unity frees us, and shared heritage gets us there…but can heritage harm as well?
We’ll study family ties, as well as the changing role of faith, throughout the text.

25. One of the accepted truths Rivera chooses to question – or at least examine – is the role of religion in the migrant experience.
Rivera posits that heritage and unity can free you – but will faith simply convince you to accept your bondage?
This is one of the more controversial aspects of the novel, as the characters experience a great deal of religious turmoil.
This is also one of the reasons that the “innocence” theme is so important – Rivera shows the crumbling of faith in the young as a response to a cruel and unjust world.

26. While faith is not placed in the best light over the course of the book, Rivera seems less interested in criticizing faith than in studying the ramifications of its loss – and what causes it to disappear.
What he does seem to criticize – in keeping with El Movemiento’s philosophies – is blind acceptance or blind faith.
After all, the movement is predicated on questioning the things (and injustices) that we have taken for granted, even unconsciously.
If you understand the larger themes Rivera is grappling with – as well as his larger ideological concerns – it’s easier to understand why religion plays the role it does early in this novel.
Does the search for the truth set you free?

27. The flip side of freedom is loneliness and isolation.
The child in the second story is isolated by his actions – and his knowledge.
They separate him from his mother / family / nascent community, all of which find their center in faith.
The truth – as he understands it – is exceptionally lonely; anyone who has kept a secret knows why.
“He’ll tell her when he grows up” – that’s a long time to carry something like that.

28. One of the noteworthy aspects of the story is the way that the “natural order” is reversed.
Rather than keeping secrets from the young to keep them in line – Santa! – the mother is blind to the “truth,” and the child chooses not to tell her.
He does this out of love – a deep, fiery love – because he knows that she will continue “doing her duty.”
What would happen to her if she found out the truth?
Think about Mother Teresa…
By drinking the water, he shoulders a burden – and he continues to carry it for her.
This means that, on some level, she has lost him.
Who should we feel sad for – the boy and his losses, or his mother and hers?

29. If it is internal, determine which external factors cause it.
There’s a great deal of conflict in that initial vignette, understated though it might be.
I’ll need you to watch for those conflicts throughout the book – what causes them, what concludes them (if anything), and who they involve.
For each story, identify what the conflicts are and whether they are internal or external. If a conflict is external, decide into which of the three categories it falls:
Character vs. Character
Character vs. Society
Character vs. Self
Note: Some work for multiple categories!
If it is internal, determine which external factors cause it.

30. If the first vignette was a deeply intense internal conflict, how do we grapple with what happens in The Children Couldn’t Wait?
Is this the result of an internal or external conflict?
Is this the result of a lack of an internal conflict?
Where is the anger? Where is the justice?
The boss tries to kill himself after he’s acquitted; he knows better, and his actions indict society’s callousness.

31. From the first two stories, Rivera is contrasting several aspects of humanity – some good, some bad, some in between.
Is the child doing something wrong in the vignette? What about in The Children Couldn’t Wait?
Is the boss evil? How do we judge his suicide attempt?
Start keeping track of the “good” and the “bad” – and start monitoring what separates the two in your eyes.
The book contains many shades of grey.
Consider these same questions for our next two stories – the mother in A Prayer and the child in It’s That It Hurts.

32. The book’s beginning gives us what we need without revealing every card.
There’s much more to come as we delve deeper into Rivera’s stories – some of which are quite dark.
Never lose sight of Rivera’s objectives: to achieve social justice for his people, to understand his own identity and place in the world, and to highlight life in all its complexities.
That’s what we do here in B2 in a nutshell…and that’s why we’ll conclude with this book.