Barrio Boy: 40th Anniversary Edition

by Ernesto Galarza, Ilan Stavans (Introduction)

Overview

Journey with Ernesto Galarza through time, place, and culture in this stunning memoir of Mexican American identity and acculturation.

Barrio Boy is the remarkable story of one boy's journey from a Mexican village so small its main street didn't have a name, to the barrio of Sacramento, California, bustling and thriving in the early decades of the twentieth century. With vivid imagery and a rare gift for re-creating a child's sense of time and place, Ernesto Galarza gives an account of the early experiences of his extraordinary life—from revolution in Mexico to segregation in the United States—that will continue to engage readers for generations to come.

Since it was first published in 1971, Galarza’s classic work has been assigned in high school and undergraduate classrooms across the country, profoundly affecting thousands of students who read this true story of acculturation into American life.

The 40th anniversary edition of this best-selling book includes a new text design and cover, as well an introduction by Ilan Stavans, the distinguished cultural critic and editor of the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, which places Barrio Boy and Ernesto Galarza in historical context.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268029791
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	02/28/2011
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Born in Jalcocotán, Nayarit, Mexico, Ernesto Galarza (1905–1984) was a civil rights and labor activist, a scholar, and a pioneer during the decades when Mexican Americans had few public advocates. When he was eight, he migrated to Sacramento, California, where he worked as a farm laborer. One of Stanford's first Chicano alumni, Galarza received an M.A. in 1929, and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1944. He returned to California where, during the 1950s, he joined the effort to create the first multiracial farm worker union, which set the foundation for the emergence of the United Farm Workers Union of the 1960s.

His books most notably include the 1964 Merchants of Labor, on the exploitation of Mexican contract workers, and the 1971 Barrio Boy. In 1979, Dr. Galarza was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Read an Excerpt

Barrio Boy began as anecdotes I told my family about Jalcocotán, the mountain village in western Mexico where I was born. Among this limited public (my wife, Mae, and daughters, Karla and Eli Lu) my thumbnail sketches became best sellers. Hearing myself tell them over and over I began to agree with my captive audience that they were not only interesting, but possibly good.

Quite by accident I told one of these vignettes at a meeting of scholars and other boring people. It was recorded on tape, printed in a magazine, and circulated among schools and libraries here and there. I received letters asking for reprints and occasionally a tempting suggestion that I write more of the same, perhaps enough to make a book.

Adding up the three listeners in my family and the three correspondents made a public of six. I didn’t need more persuasion than this to link the anecdotes into a story.

But a book is more than a family affair. To make it a public affair I needed more weighty excuses. I thought of two—one historical, the other psychological.

What brought me and my family to the United States from Mexico also brought hundreds of thousands of others like us. In many ways the experiences of a multitude of boys like myself, migrating from countless villages like Jalcocotán and starting life anew in barrios like the one in Sacramento, must have been similar. So much for the historical.

Now for the psychological. Of those boys, the ones who are still living are grey-haired, slightly cantankerous, and in all probability creaking at the joints, like myself. But the worst thing that has happened to them is that some psychologists, psychiatrists, social anthropologists and other manner of “shrinks” have spread the rumor that these Mexican immigrants and their offspring have lost their “self-image.” By this, of course, they mean that a Mexican doesn’t know what he is; and if by chance he is something, it isn’t any good.

I, for one Mexican, never had any doubts on this score. I can’t remember a time I didn’t know who I was; and I have heard much testimony from my friends and other more detached persons to the effect that I thought too highly of what I thought I was.

It seemed to me unlikely that out of six or seven million Mexicans in the United States I was the only one who felt this way. In any event, those I knew and remember and tell about had an abundance of self-image and never doubted that it was a good one.

That is all there is to the plot of Barrio Boy: our home “In the Mountain Village”; the “Peregrinations” of a family uprooted by a revolution; their escape as refugees, “North from Mexico”; their new “Life in the Lower Part of Town” in a city in California; and their joys and tribulations “On the Edge of the Barrio.”

This, then, is a true story of the acculturation of Little Ernie.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1. In a Mountain Village

Part 2. Peregrinations

Part 3. North From Mexico

Part 4. Life in the Lower Part of Town

Part 5. On the Edge of the Barrio

Glossary

Editorial Reviews

"To re-encounter Barrio Boy by Ernesto Galarza is to indulge in deja vu from the early Chicano Movement concerns about acculturation and identity construction. The genuine story about a boy's journey reminds many of us of our own trajectory and how we had to negotiate a new ethnic self. The lessons are moving and heart-warming as markers of a collective perseverance and survival. The story embodies a key phase of immigration when the barrio becomes our first community to embrace or overcome. After all is said and done, the 'barrio boy' stays true to himself as an apprentice to Americanism without sacrificing his origins. He proves that being bicultural and bilingual are positive qualities worthy of upholding." —Francisco A. Lomeli, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Galarza’s classic speaks louder now than when I read it as an undergrad in 1970 during the early formation of Chicano Studies at UCLA. The novel’s triple metaphors of the rooster versus the vulture, the boy versus the bull and the village versus the city braid into a whip of power in bold relief—colonization, displacement and exploitation. The painful transitions from the familiar to the strange and from the harmonies of the village to the existential vacuums of the metropolis are given to us to re-consider and behold—brutal forces that may have gained momentum in our millennium. Yet, there is fragile beauty, inescapable synthesis, and leadership burning out of a new voice shifting between home and homeland. You must take this book and treasure it, walk with it, converse with it and carry its most human story in your heart—so you will live and act fully. A cultural classic yesterday, a riveting, fiery illumination today." —Juan Felipe Herrera, former U.S. Poet Laureate

“A useful introduction by Ilan Stavans and Galarza’s original preface accompanies this fortieth-anniversary edition of Barrio Boy. The book is well known within Chicano literary scholarship. It belongs to the genre of autobiography, certainly an empirical genre, a form of personal history, but also a self-portrait, a story that may serve as an example for readers.” —Journal of American Ethnic History

“The 40th anniversary edition of Galarza’s book [is] now a standard text in high school and college classrooms.” —Occidental College

“Galarza’s book is about growing up—first in Mexico, then in America. To this reader, it is on the same artistic level as Black Boy or Call It Sleep or even Huckleberry Finn. . . . As with Wright and Roth and Twain, we are given a near-perfect tale of rising from absolute poverty to middle-class security, but instead of a woeful recounting, it is filled with the joy of discovery: from living in the lively muddy streets of a small village in Nayarit to surviving, wide-eyed, in the lively and noisy barrios of Sacramento.” —RALPH: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities

“In 1971, at the age of sixty-six, the labour activist, educator and scholar Ernesto Galarza (1905-1984) published Barrio Boy, a memoir of the long migration of his family from a small village in the Sierra Madre to California. Barrio Boy immediately became a classic of Chicano literature, and on its fortieth anniversary has now been published in a new edition with an introduction by the critic, biographer and short-story writer Ilan Stavans.”—TLS

From the Publisher

"To re-encounter Barrio Boy by Ernesto Galarza is to indulge in deja vu from the early Chicano Movement concerns about acculturation and identity construction. The genuine story about a boy's journey reminds many of us of our own trajectory and how we had to negotiate a new ethnic self. The lessons are moving and heart-warming as markers of a collective perseverance and survival. The story embodies a key phase of immigration when the barrio becomes our first community to embrace or overcome. After all is said and done, the 'barrio boy' stays true to himself as an apprentice to Americanism without sacrificing his origins. He proves that being bicultural and bilingual are positive qualities worthy of upholding."

Francisco A. Lomeli