Barrio Boy 40th Anniversary Edition [Paperback]

About the Book  

Since it was first published in 1971, Galarza's classic workhas 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.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication ofBarrio Boy, the University of Notre Dame Press is proud to reissue this best-selling book with a new text design and cover, as well an introduction--by Ilan Stavans, the distinguished cultural critic and editor of theNorton Anthology of Latino Literature--which places Ernesto Galarza andBarrio Boyin historical context.

About the Author

Ernesto Galarza(1905-1984) was a labor organizer, historian, professor, and community activist. When he was eight, he migrated from Jalcocotan, Nayarit, Mexico, to Sacramento, California, where he worked as a farm laborer. He received a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. In addition toBarrio Boy, he is the author of a number of books, includingStrangers in Our Fields(1956),Merchants of Labor(1964), andSpiders in the House and Workers in the Fields(1970). In 1979, Dr. Galarza was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"Unlike people who are born in hospitals, in an ambulance, or in a taxicab I showed up in an adobe cottage with a thatched roof that stood at one end of the only street of Jalcocotan, which everybody called Jalco for short. Like many other small villages in the wild, majestic mountains of the Sierra Madre de Nayarit, my pueblo was a hideaway. Even though you lived there, arriving in Jalco was always a surprise." --from Chapter 1

Reviews of the original edition:

". . . An illuminating record of the forebodings of ordinary rural Mexicans at the beginning of the revolution." --The New York Review l³›