… And the Earth Did Not Part

by Tomás Rivera

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in Texas and the midwestern United States in the 1940s and ‘50s; published in Spanish (as … y no se to tragό latierra) in 1970, in English in 1971.

SYNOPSIS

Comprised of 12 vignettes, the novel exposes the racial, social, and economic obstacles faced by Mexican and Mexican American migrants in their daily lives in a hostile country.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Tomás Rivera was born in Crystal City, Texas, in 1935 to Mexican American parents. Migrant laborers, they traversed the South and Midwest each year in search of enough work to support the family. Rivera later wanted to relate his experiences growing up as a migrant worker but felt reluctant to write in English—a language he did not consider fully expressive of his emotions. His dilemma was solved by Quinto Sol Publications, one of the first companies to publish in Spanish and English: “When I learned that Quinto Sol accepted manuscripts in Spanish, it liberated me. I knew that I could fully express myself as I wanted” (Rivera in Lomeli and Shirley, p. 207). Rivera submitted… and the earth did not part to a literary contest sponsored by Quinto Sol and was awarded first prize. The company published the work in Spanish that year (1970), then issued a bilingual edition in 1971. The novel managed for the first time to portray the overlooked experience of Mexican and Mexican American migrants in the United States.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Migrant labor

During World War II, Mexico and the United States entered into an unprecedented agreement that would endure for 22 years (1942-64). Called the Bracero Program, it sanctioned the contracting of temporary migrant laborers from Mexico to the United States under certain conditions. These conditions, insisted on largely by Mexico, aimed to protect migrants from past abuses in the United States, of which Mexican can authorities were well aware. There was to be a written labor contract for the migrant workers; employers or the U.S. government would pay expenses incurred for travel from Mexico to the work site; and public places could not refuse the workers service on account of their ethnicity. In the event that a state permitted such discrimination, it would be banned from participating in the program. Rivera’s novel focuses on Texas, where anti-Mexican discrimination was so rampant that the state was ineligible for the Bracero Program from 1942 to 1946. Instead its growers hired undocumented (illegal) migrants, who were called “wetbacks” (because they crossed the Rio Grand river from Mexico into the United States).

In hindsight, the Bracero Program encouraged legal and illegal emigration from a half dozen states in north-central Mexico. The arrangement, which had been initiated because of the dearth of workers in the United States during World War II, stimulated even greater migration after the war, as reflected by records from the program’s first decade:

CREW LEADERS: FRIEND OR FOE?

While some crew leaders worked diligently to find steady work, good wages, and decent living conditions for a worker, others took advantage of the worker’s dependence on them. In the novel, a worker worries about the way his crew leader has exploited him;

He loaned me two hundred dollars, but by the time one pays for the trip almost half is gone, what with this business of having to pay half fare for children. And when I get back I have to pay back double the amount. Four hundred dollars! Interest is too high, but there’s no way out of it, one can’t fool around when one is in need. l’ve been told to turn him in because the interest rates are too high, but the fact is that he even has the Trust Deed to my house already.

(Rivera,… and the earth did not part p. 158)

How would a U.S. employer recruit braceros? Mexico’s government would accept candidates, then turn them over to the U.S. Department of Labor, whose representatives selected those fit for agricultural work. The candidates were next transported to the United States, where another official took their fingerprints and prepared documents for them, after which they were sent to labor contract centers near the border. They would be screened by a health official, then considered for hire by visiting employers or their agents. This was more or less the official procedure, though in some years it slackened—government officials were bypassed and employers or their agents dealt directly with the workers.

Often migrants, be they braceros or wetbacks, found jobs through an agent or crew leader who would contract with farmers to provide labor for the harvest. Unfortunately, these crew leaders frequently abused their power. They charged workers exorbitant fees for transportation, garnished wages for food and supplies, and advanced money at 50 percent interest rates. As a result of these unethical practices, many migrant workers ended the harvest season deeply in debt.

Even when harvests were abundant and migrant workers found steady jobs, their wages remained far below U.S. poverty levels. In 1941 a Texas state study revealed an average annual income of $350 for a 6-7 member family in agricultural labor, compared to $480 for a 4-5 member family on relief, or welfare (Kibbe, p. 89). The continual influx of new migrants made it possible for farmowners to keep wages miserably low. If a laborer refused to work under abysmal conditions for unbearably low wages, ten others were ready to fill his or her place. The consequent fear of losing one’s job, along with brutal employment practices, kept migrants working for hours on end under a blistering sun, often winding up with heat stroke or worse. It was not until union organization in the 1960s that the migrant laborers would become formidable enough to overcome such exploitation.

Not only the workday but also the work year was harsh. Given the different harvest seasons and locations of crops, migrants were on the move practically year-round to keep their families clothed and fed. Migrants from Texas typically left the state from December through October:

December-March: Trek to Florida for the orange harvest.

April-June: Harvest asparagus across the country in Washington State.

July-August: Trek back thousands of miles to New York to pick onions.

August-September: Truck over to Virginia to harvest tomatoes.

September-October: Return to New York to pick strawberries.

Other stops included sugar beet and onion farms in Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota; some migrant workers even crossed over into Canada. In November they would head back to Texas or perhaps home to Mexico until the process began anew.

Miserable conditions

In addition to poor wages, sporadic work, and unscrupulous crew leaders, migrant workers faced countless dangers in the fields and poor living conditions in their temporary quarters away from home. Rafael Guerra, a third-generation migrant from Texas who spent his early childhood working in the fields with his parents, remembers their miserable housing on the farms:

We lived in terrible places when we were working in the fields, sometimes chicken coops, really. No windows, no plumbing, no water, swarms of mosquitoes every night in some places. The walls were like paper, and you could hear everything, babies crying all night. My mother used to douse the floors with kerosene where we stayed, to kill the bugs.

(Guerra in Ashabranner, p. 53)

It is hardly surprising, given these conditions and the grueling labor, that the average farm worker’s lifespan was 49 years, compared with the national average of 74 years.

While some farms provided clean, comfortable housing, most failed to do so. As a rule, like Rafael Guerra, the laborers found themselves herded into poorly kept living quarters that lacked basic conveniences. The unsanitary environment put them at risk for preventable infections—tuberculosis, flu, pneumonia, and intestinal parasites. But the work itself posed the greatest danger. Falls from ladders in orchards were common, as was injury and maiming from equipment. Since their wages depended on how much they picked, many workers kept up a rapid pace, focusing more on filling their bags or buckets than on safety. There was also danger from pesticides sprayed on fields; as many as 1,000 workers died each year from exposure to these chemicals.

In the title vignette, “… and the earth did not part,” a young boy feels hate and anger for the first time when he thinks about the conditions in which his family is forced to work. His aunt dies from tuberculosis and his father and brother are incapacitated by sunstroke from working too long in the heat. The boy vents his frustration to his mother: “Either the germs eat us from the inside or the sun from the outside. . . . Why should we always be tied to the dirt, half buried in the earth like animals without any hope of any kind?” (… and the earth, pp. 75-76).

Education and migrant children

The constant moving of migrant families had disastrous effects on the education of migrant children. Not only was their schooling constantly interrupted, but in many cases the children were kept out of school to work in the fields for pay. One study estimated that only 42.5 percent of the state’s Latino (mostly Mexican) children enrolled in Texas public schools in 1944-45 (Kibbe, p. 86). A U.S. Labor Department study of 1941 provided many case studies of families who simply could not afford to have children attend school rather than work. Oralia Leal recalls her family being faced with this dilemma in her childhood:

I went to school a little bit but not much, maybe two months a year. My parents knew it was important, but the money I could make in the fields when we had a chance to work was more important. I couldn’t get much out of school anyway because I didn’t speak any English then, just Spanish.

(Leal in Ashabranner, p. 63)

COMPETITION FOR LABOR

Between 1940 and 1950 the United States Immigration service apprehended more than 800,000 illegal Mexican immigrants, lt estimates that at least three times as many escaped detection and remained working as migrant laborers during this period. With so many farmhands in need of jobs and without sufficient labor and wage regulations to stop them, farmers and large agricultural conglomerates deflated the wages they paid and still found laborers willing to work. A farm worker in McAllen, Texas, summed up a common attitude: [The farm ers] prefer to get people from Mexico because if (the workers! have an accident … they just throw them back to Mexico, and that will be the end of it. No responsibility, If you’re more hungry than me, you got to work more cheap” (Dunbar and Kravitz, p. 15).

When migrant children did attend school, they often felt unwelcome and found themselves segregated from the rest of the students. With this segregation came an inferior education, as acknowledged by a Texas state survey: “In some instances segregation has been used for the purpose of giving the Mexican children a shorter school year, inferior buildings and equipment, and poorly paid teachers” (Reynolds in Mirande, p. 98). Segregated or not, the children were encouraged to abandon their heritage and language. Many schools had rules against speaking Spanish and failed to include lessons on Mexico’s history—even though for three centuries the territory now comprising Texas was governed by Spain and Mexico, and the region’s people had spoken Spanish. There were relevant lessons to learn, too, about Mexico’s influence on the United States. Texas, for example, was one of the first states to enact women’s property rights (in 1845), adopting this policy from Mexican law. Rather than acknowledge such contributions, the U.S. mainstream alienated migrant children of the 1940s and ‘50s and subjected them to intimidating treatment in some schools. The first class often began with the nurse searching a migrant child for lice, as a young boy reports in … and the earth did not part:

They pulled me out of the classroom as soon as I arrived and they took me to the nurse who was all dressed in white. They made me take off all my clothes and they examined me all over. . . . But where they took the longest was on my head. . . . After a while they let me go, but I was very embarrassed because I had to take off my pants and even my shorts in front of the nurse.

(… and the earth, p. 31)

When the same boy gets into a fight with a white student, the principal talks about what to do with him. The principal makes an assumption about how the boy’s parents will react, “They could care less if I expel him… they need him in the fields” (… and the earth, p. 33). Rivera’s own case demonstrates how false the first part of this assumption is. Though they could have benefited from his work in the fields, his parents enrolled him in schools wherever they traveled, even after he graduated from high school. “My parents were still working in Iowa, but I would only work three months and then I had to return to complete the year at the college” (Rivera in Lomeli and Shirley, p. 207).

Discrimination in South Texas

In the early 1940s Texans themselves began objecting in force to anti-Mexican discrimination. It is true that they were in part pushed to do so because they wanted to qualify for the Bracero Program, but in any case U.S. citizens here and elsewhere started to take action. Cartoons depicting blatant anti-Mexican discrimination by Texans appeared in Time magazine and the state formed an independent commission to investigate allegations of wrongdoing. Conducting a survey in 1943, the Good Neighbor Commission received 117 complaints. Most of them involved the refusal to serve Mexicans in public places. Others involved segregated schools and unequal working or housing conditions. The majority of complaints originated in West Texas, in rural cotton-growing communities that relied on migrant labor. In South Texas, too, complaints stemmed from rural communities.

McAllen, Texas, was not deemed by the Commission to be a discriminatory community, yet an incident there exposed prejudice in the small farming town. In the mid-1940s the local Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) began raising funds to buy the city swimming pool. Donations poured in until rumors surfaced that the YMCA intended to allow Mexican Americans into the pool. When the YMCA confirmed that they were considering such a policy, many patrons demanded refunds and donations slowed. During an emergency meeting, YMCA directors considered three alternatives: allow no Mexican Americans; allow Mexican Americans if they belonged to Anglo organizations renting the pool; or allow no Mexican Americans Tuesday through Sunday, permit them to use the pool on Monday when it was closed, then drain and scrub it Monday night. Hearing this news, Mexican Americans responded with outrage and the YMCA agreed to adopt a nonsegregated policy, after which donations from Anglos slowed even further. In the end, the owner of the pool decided not to sell it to the YMCA because of the nonsegregation policy.

In Rivera’s novel, similar discriminatory attitudes appear in the vignettes “It is Painful” and “Christmas Eve.” The stories feature attempts to keep Mexican Americans out of school and out of a white shopping area because they are believed to be dirty and prone to petty thievery. In contrast to these stereotypes, Rivera’s novel reveals the dignity, ambition, perseverance, and frustrations of the Mexican migrants:

My poor husband, he must be very tired by now. . . . And there’s no way I can help him, burdened as I am with the two children I’m holding. … I wish I could help him out in the fields this year. . . . At least I can help him along now so he won’t feel the strain so much. . . . That husband of mine, from the time the kids are still small he already wants them to be in school. I hope I can help him. May God grant that I be able to help him.

(… and the earth, p. 159)

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

Written as 12 vignettes,… and the earth did not part portrays the Mexican migrant worker experience in various facets and forms. “El Año Perdido (The Lost Year),” the prologue that opens the work, introduces a protagonist trapped in a cycle of memories that he equates to a lost year. The 12 vignettes that follow evoke a series of recollections; together they represent the 12 months lost to everyone in this cycle of struggle and hardship. Each vignette paints a vivid and emotionally charged portrait of life in the Mexican American community. Each is told in a different voice, from a different perspective.

“The Children Were Victims” begins with a stark portrait of a migrant boy, killed for daring to drink water out of turn. The overseer fires his rifle just to scare him, but the shot ends up killing the boy.

“A Prayer” describes a mother praying to God to watch over her son, who is a soldier fighting in the Korean War.

“It Is Painful” depicts a migrant boy’s first day at a new school. When he gets into a fight with another boy in his class, the school principal expels

LETTER TO THE GOVERNOR

In February of 1945 Governor Coke R. Stevenson of Texas received a letter from Sergeant Ramon Espinosa, a decorated soldier fighting in World War II.

Dear Sir:

I was born in Texas 23 years ago. I have been in the Service for 3 years, I was on furlough and on my way home stopped at a Highway Cafe to eat supper. I was very hungry. So the manager says, “You are Mexican.” I said yes, He said for me to get out, I am sure this is very wrong, I am sure that you can, and will help me, and I will fight harder, so that this war may end sooner. In the front lines we do not ask the next man what race he is. Nor does my Commanding Officer.

Yours truly,

Sgt. Ramon Espinosa

(Espinosa in Kibbe, p. 212)

him, expecting that it won’t matter much to his parents.

“His Hand in His Pocket” concerns a young boy who has to live with an older couple in order to finish the school year after his parents leave for the summer harvest. An eyewitness to their acts of murder and theft, he is forced to do some morally repugnant dirty work for the “respectable” couple.

“It Was A Silvery Night” features a boy who tries to summon the devil and then questions the existence of God.

“… and the earth did not part” portrays a boy contemplating the cruelties of life when his father is stricken with sunstroke. He curses God for his family’s misery and is astonished when the earth does not part to swallow him.

“First Holy Communion” follows a boy on the way to church for his first communion. He peers into a window and witnesses a man and a woman having sexual relations. Believing he has committed a sin of the flesh by seeing them, the boy finds it difficult to go through with the communion. But once it is over, he begins viewing the world in a new light and determines to learn more about sin and human nature.

“Little Children Burned” centers on a couple whose lives are torn apart when their children are killed in a fire because the parents had to leave them alone and go to work.

“The Night of the Blackout” focuses on a migrant laborer who returns home from working in the Midwest and discovers that his girlfriend has been unfaithful in his absence. Sinking into depression, the young man walks to the power plant and electrocutes himself, causing a power outage in the town.

“Christmas Eve” portrays a timid Mexican mother. Afraid of the bewildering white world around her, she ventures downtown to buy Christmas presents for her children. She is disoriented by the crowds in the department store and, in her confusion, flees with some unpur-chased toys. She is arrested for being a thief and vows never to go downtown again when talking over the experience with a sympathetic person.

“In Mexico it isn’t Santa Claus who brings toys, but the Reyes Magos [three kings]. And they don’t come until the sixth of January.”

“… I’ll tell [the boys] there is no Santa Claus so they won’t bother you with [not getting presents] anymore.”

“No… tell them that if they didn’t get anything for Christmas, it’s because the Reyes Magos will bring them something.”

“But… well, whatever you say. I guess it’s always best to have hope.”

(… and the earth, pp. 129, 133)

“The Portrait” focuses on the reaction of a couple almost swindled by a portrait salesman who plays on their love for their dead son, who served as a U.S. soldier in Korea.

“When We Arrive” shares the experiences of a truckload of migrant laborers traveling across country to find work.

“Under the House” concludes the novel with the character from the prologue emerging from his hiding place. It first appears that he skipped school and crawled under the house. But when he emerges, he is a man, not the boy he believes himself to be. A neighbor pities him: “Poor family. First the mother, and now him. Maybe he is going crazy. I think he’s losing his mind. He has lost his sense of time. He’s lost track of the years” (… and the earth, p. 177).

With the realization that all the novel’s harsh situations have happened to this one character, the grimness of the migrant experience is revealed. As the man shuffles away, the reader realizes that the lost year, suggested by the preceding 12 vignettes, is actually all the lost years of the man’s life.

Alienation of Mexican Americans

Throughout the novel, the Mexican American characters come into very little contact with white American society. Whenever contact is made, there are always negative consequences for the Mexican Americans: the white overseer accidentally kills a young Mexican American; the white principal kicks a boy out of school; the white portrait salesman cheats the entire Mexican American community. These painful interactions expose prevalent attitudes toward Mexican Americans at the time; they were regarded as either animals good only for work, violent thugs who posed a threat to white children, or stupid victims who made easy targets. Certainly they were perceived as inferior.

The stereotype harked back to the 1920s, a decade in which the mainstream population in the United States thought of Mexican immigrants as Indian peons. Descriptions of the decade identified the Mexicans as “docile, indolent, and backward” (Gutiérrez, p. 25). Since they were Indians, people argued, they had little sense of cleanliness or of saving for the future; once they had some money, they would be inclined to quit work and take it easy, so it was best to keep wages low.

Meanwhile, the Mexican immigrants developed divergent attitudes within their own community. The attitudes of the mainstream promoted a sense of alienation from the rest of American society. Feelings of isolation and alienation from the white community surface in the novel, from the prologue in which the protagonist hides under the house, to “Christmas Eve,” in which a young mother feels terrified of downtown, much preferring the rural environment she knows. When she forces herself to make a shopping trip, the downtown district overwhelms and disorients her. She feels alone and afraid despite the teeming streets. Her sense of separation reflects an emotion experienced by many Mexican Americans at this time. A young migrant woman described a similar experience: “Sometimes someone asks me if I was envious of people I saw in towns who had good homes and good clothes and big new cars. No, 1 wasn’t. They belonged to another world, a world I didn’t know anything about” (Ashabranner, p. 63).

Meanwhile, leaders in the Mexican American community shared divergent opinions about relations to mainstream society in the United States. Opinions were broadcast in daily newspapers—La Prensa in San Antonio, Texas, and La Opinión in Los Angeles, California. La Opinión set the tone for immigrants in the first few decades of the twentieth century, advising against Americanization. Perhaps we are exploited here, the newspaper admitted, but life is, after all, better than in Mexico. We should not try to gain equal rights by joining labor unions, for membership requires us to become U.S. citizens. We would lose our cultural integrity and to no avail, for the mainstream would still treat us as if we were inferior aliens. American ways (in architecture and music, for example) have already spilled over onto the Mexican side of the border and begun to savage our culture, to make it less civilized. We should guard against the corruption of our culture during our sojourn in the United States, developing self-reliant communities here, cultural enclaves of our own.

The 1930s saw the advent of other, contrary opinions, published in the weekly El Espectador by Ignacio L. López of Pomona, California. Instead of self-induced segregation, it promoted integration while maintaining Mexican ethnic ways. El Espectador encouraged both attendance at U.S. public schools and bilingual education, for example. (La Opinión had called for a separate Mexican school system in the United States.) Over the years, then, there was heated debate among Mexicans about how to address the sense of alienation that surfaces in the novel and that characterized much of the migrant population before and during the decades in which it is set.

Sources and literary context

Rivera’s own experiences as a child in a migrant laborer family inspired him to write… and the earth did not part. As he explains, “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” (Rivera in Lomeli and Shirley, p. 210).

The publication of … and the earth did not part marks an important milestone in Mexican American literature. The Mexican American novel before the 1970s was typically a work of social protest or a fictionalized account of personal experiences. While Rivera’s novel is in a way both these things, its stark realism and fragmented structure set it apart and influenced a whole new generation of writers. By presenting the grim realities of migrant life in a way that also celebrated Mexican American culture, Rivera encourage other writers to follow suit.

ORAL LEGACY: STORIES AND POEMS

Rivera uses small anecdotes to set the tone for each of the chapters. Most of these introductions focus on details of migrant life, the tragedies and small triumphs.

The teacher was astonished with the youngster when, upon learning that the class needed a button with which to designate the button industry on a poster, he tore one off his shirt and gave it to her… because she knew that it was probably the only shirt he owned.

(… and the earth, p. 99)

These introductions were inspired by the oral tradition Rivera encountered while working among migrant workers in his early life. In retrospect, Rivera describes the tales as a type of balm, that is, as soothing relief from the daily grind. “There was always someone who knew the old traditional stories… People find refuge… sitting in a circle, listening, telling stories and, through words, escaping to other worlds as well as inventing them” (Rivera in Lomeli and Shirley, p. 209).

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

The turbulent ‘60s

There was a cultural explosion in the 1960s, a profound new commitment to the social transformation of the disadvantaged in U.S. society and to the acquisition by minorities of the rights they were owed by law. Migrant workers benefited from the ferment, joining labor unions like César Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association in California. Chavez’s union, later called United Farm Workers (UFW), mounted a strike against table-grape growers in 1965. The nonviolent strike, staged largely to combat low wages, grew into a national cause, a “crusade for human dignity and civil rights” (Meier and Ribera, p. 210). Among the strikers were Filipino as well as Mexican American farm workers, who politicized their cause in 1966 with a 250-mile march to the state capital (Sacramento), in 1967 with a 25-day fast by Chavez, and from 1968 to 1970 with a national table-grape boycott. The strike ended successfully in 1970, the year the novel appeared, undoubtedly leaving the strikers feeling satisfied about their ability to improve conditions through direct action. Most of the grape growers entered into new three-year contracts that were favorable to the migrant workers. For the time being, in California at least, conditions had improved.

Chavez tried to expand the union to Texas, the base for the migrant farm workers in … and the earth did not part. However, the union fared less well here. Texas farm workers staged strikes of their own from 1966 to 1969 but failed to gain widespread support. In the end, these strikes did little for Texas’s migrant workers, though they did rivet attention on Mexican American civil rights groups in the state.

The plays of Luis Valdez publicized the plight of migrant workers too. Working with Chavez in California, Valdez had founded El Teatro Campesino, “the farm workers’ theater,” and developed a type of play called the acto to inspire workers to try to rectify the injustices they suffered. A typical acto showed a wicked grower (bearing a sign that designated his profession) thrown to the ground by an upstanding worker who would release the tyrant only after he had signed a labor contract. In 1967 Valdez took El Teatro Campesino across the country and by 1971 his plays had expanded from the evils of farm labor to other subjects touched on by Rivera’s novel, like the failure to meet the needs of Mexican American students or to teach about the contributions of their culture in public schools.

La Raza Unida

Texas’s Mexican American community contributed to the ferment of the era by founding a third political party, an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans that promised to improve life for its members. The formation of the party was closely bound up with conditions in Texas schools. When the community of Crystal City, Texas, was first established, there was no school for Mexican American students. They were gradually integrated into the school system, with limited success. In 1951 a mere 9 percent of Mexican American first graders had gone on to graduate from high school. By 1958 the figure had climbed only to 17 percent. The average amount of school completed by Spanish-sur-named students in Crystal City was just 2.3 years, compared to the 11.2 years of Anglo students. Even though the community was 80 percent Mexican American, the school board and local government were completely controlled by Anglos. Racist policies prevailed, with many of the teachers showing prejudice. According to one source, these teachers “precipitated many incidents in their classrooms, occasionally lashing out at all Mexicans, telling them they ‘should feel privileged to sit next to whites,’ and in general doing their best to make the Mexicans feel insecure and inferior” (Shockley in Mirande, p. 99).

In 1963 Mexican Americans began to mobilize against the local government and succeeded in taking control of the Cystal City city council. The takeover lasted only two years, and conditions at the school and in the local community remained as before. But in 1969 the Mexican American community rallied again and carried out a successful school boycott, which led to the establishment of the political party El Partido de la Raza Unida. The political party organized local Mexican Americans and gave them the power to regain control of the city council and the school board. Similar conflicts were occurring at the same time in California’s barrio schools as Mexican Americans realized the power that institutes of learning held in each community:

Schools had become the no man’s land of the cultural conflict. They are the most visible, best known, and most exposed institutions of the Anglo society in the barrios. On the inside they are the bastions where the language, philosophy, and goals of the conqueror are taught; but to those outside they are the bastions that the conquered can most easily besiege, with common cause, so that their children may be taught the language, philosophy, and goals of La Raza.

(Steiner in Mirande, p. 100)

Rivera was certainly aware of this conflict; he was born and spent much of his early life in Crystal City. Moreover, he taught Spanish and English in Crystal City from 1958 to 1960 and would have known many of the school boycott’s central figures. The school in his novel mirrors the problems of the Crystal City public school system.

In the end, all the ferment would produce mixed results. Some Mexican Americans were elected to political office, unionization stimulated wage increases, and bilingual education took root, but eventually the activism died down. The hard-core activists, say some historians, failed to perceive the conservative nature of most Mexican Americans. Some balked at joining a farmworkers’ union, the union’s membership declined, and La Raza Unida lost ground, gaining a reputation for being too radical. However, in the early 1970s, when Rivera wrote his novel, activism was still on the rise, fanning the hope—which surfaces in … and the earth did not part—that Mexicans would come from under the house, so to speak, and gain rights and proper remuneration in U.S. society.

Reviews

From the moment of its publication, Rivera’s first novel,… and the earth did not part, received praise. Critics were struck by the tragic tones of the novel, and moved by Rivera’s ability to tell the stories of the migrant workers in the American Southwest. Daniel Testa wrote of the novel: “With a free and flexible narrative technique, the author blends abrupt exchanges of dialogue, shifts of perspective, and internal monologue into the account of an external action or series of actions” (Testa in Lesniak, p. 369). Other critics also recognized the dy namic nature of the storytelling. Juan Bruce-Novoa praised the realism achieved by Rivera’s style: “It is a measure of Rivera’s talent that the reader thinks that s/he has read a detailed depiction of reality, so much so, that many have used the book as an accurate sociological statement of the migrants’ condition” (Bruce-Novoa in Lesniak, p. 369). Reviewers were also impressed by the novel’s success in showing how the inner strength of the migrants prevails, despite the bleakness of their lives and the continual tragedies they suffer. “What Rivera achieves is the evocation of an environment with a minimum of words, and within that environment the migratory farmworkers move with dignity, strength, and resilience” (Bruce-Novoa in Lesniak, p. 369). While critics continued to praise Rivera’s narrative dexterity, it was his depiction of the migrant life that made the greatest impact. Ralph Grajeda focused on this element of the novel in his review: “Rivera has a clear eye for the cruel ironies of life. In the world his characters inhabit, people are often victimized by the very hopes they nurture, hopes that spring from the positions in life which they endure” (Grajeda in Lesniak, p. 369). This is perhaps the way Rivera would prefer the novel be remembered. He has claimed that the novel was not meant to be political, but rather a testament to the way in which migrant workers have lived. As a former migrant worker himself, Rivera wanted to “document, somehow, the strength of those people that I had known” (Rivera in Lomeli and Shirley, p. 210).

—Terence Davis

For More Information

Ashabranner, Brent. Dark Harvest: Migrant Farmworkers in America. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1985.

Dunbar, Tony, and Linda Kravitz, eds. Hard Traveling: Migrant Farm Workers in America. Cambridge: Ballinger Publishing, 1976.

Gutiérrez, David G. Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States. Wilmington, Del: Scholarly Resources, 1996.

Kibbe, Pauline R. Latin Americans in Texas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1946.

Lesniak, James G., ed. Contemporary Authors New Revision Señes. Vol. 32. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991.

Lomeli, Francisco A., and Carl R. Shirley, eds. Chicano Writers.1st series. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 82. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989.

Mirande, Alfredo. The Mexican American Experìence: An Alternative Perspective. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985.

Meier, Matt S., and Feliciano Ribera. Mexican Americans—American Mexicans: From Conquistadors to Chícanos. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Rivera, Tomás. . . . and the earth did not part. Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1971.