My New Book is Available!

My new book, "Songs From the Barrio" is now available at https://www.createspace.com/3902152.  It is the culmination and distillation of an idea that festered in me for many years. I started writing when I was a young soldier in Germany in 1963. I had no idea then where it would take me. But I knew I wanted to write!

And here it is at last! Here I am at 74 and publishing my first book, proving that you are never to old to realize your dreams! But it is well that it all worked out the way it did, but I almost missed the boat; I have finally aquired all the the tools to do it with: experience, writing skill, a good memory, and the inherited gift of story-telling passed to me by my ancestors.

The stories in my book tell of a people, a time and place of which only remnants remain. They began as a series of disjointed stories I wrote about my childhood, growing up in a Mexican barrio in Central California in the middle of 20th Century, stories and poems of escapades and the amazing people I grew up around, Mexican immigrants who had so much to teach, to give. After reading my stories to audiences for years, and hearing them react: laugh, cry and applaud in approval, I began to toy with the idea of putting them all into a book.

Above all, it is a story about the beauty of culture, language and tradition. Much of the book tells of my mother, who married at 15 and emigrated to the US with my dad in the early 1920s and her detemination to single-handedly raise a family of 7. It is a story of triumph, my own and of a people estranged from their language and culture, finding their rightful place in an alien world.

If you read and enjoy it, share it with friends and family, and take a precious moment to share comments on this blog. If you read and enjoy it, take a moment to post a short "review" by clicking on my book at Amazon.com.

It is NOW available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and Kindle. Teachers: please look at it for a possible reader in your class. I believe the reading level to be 7-college. I can be contacted at rrios39@sbcglobal.net. I have a discount code for orders of 20 or more copies.

It Ain’t Easy Being Mexican

 

            Some years ago my mother-in-law, and brother- in-law visited us here in Stockton from Mexico City. In the midst of the usual small talk, I said something to the effect that I considered myself “Mexican.”  “No, tu no eres Mexicano”, she said. “Yes, I am,” I countered. “No, you are not.  You are an American,” she insisted. “But both of my parents were Mexican!”  “That doesn’t make any difference. To be Mexican, you would have had to be born in Mexico.” Worse, I expected my cuñado to come to my defense, but he just acquiesced. “She’s right, Richard. You were born here, so you are not Mexican.”

            I was deeply hurt. Angry. Yes, I was born “ here”, but I had always considered myself Mexican. The idea that an arbitrary line in the sand, nay a cyclone fence, could designate my ethnicity infuriated me! In my day, we had no designations like Mexican-American, Latino, Hispanic. The word Chicano was bantered about, but it was a cautionary term, loaded with a enchilada-full of negative connotations: “Don’t you know that Chicano means "Chingádo?” Mexicans would ask incredulously. Having learned my lesson, I wouldn’t dare use it to call myself around my suegrita, and cuñado, or any Mexican. Later on, of course, the label took on some measure of respect.

          I mean, what did these people want from me? My parents were both from Mexico. I speak Spanish (though minced), I eat tortillas and frijoles, I love chíle, and Menudo; I listen to Pedro Infánte, Jorge Negréte, and laugh at the caustic lines of Cantínflas. I too go bananas when I hear a Mariachi strike up, and savor a shot of tequila con limon y sal. I can play a guitar, sing corridos and rancheras, and even a bolero or two? I listen to Ignacio Lopez Tárzo and totally get him. One time, I even peed alongside Cuco Sanchez in the men’s room during a concert in Mexico City, for Pete’s sake! So what if I happen to speak English, too, through no fault of my own? Don’t hold that against me.

       To me, being Mexican ought to be a thing of the heart, El Corazón. Or something in one’s blood, sangre. Strangely,  Americans had no problem calling me “Mexican”, including some of my teachers when I was a kid. During the 40s, when some of us were ashamed or too embarrassed to call ourselves Mexican, we opted for being “Spanish”, a word we deemed had more class.

       Oddly, I wound up becoming a Chicano/Mexican Studies teacher in college and my job was to teach about culture, in our case, Mexican culture and history and how it impacted who and what we immigrants of that culture have become, and how that fits into our amazing Melting Pot.  Luckily, I knew about it first hand, not just from a book. Even students from Mexico or Latin America were amazed with what they learned about “their culture” in my classes.

        As if in a final, sweet twist of irony, Marina, one of my Mexican students, an immigrant, raised her hand in class one day saying, “You know, Mr. Rios, I find it ironic that I was born and raised in Mexico and had to come to the United States to learn about my culture!” Asi es.

 

The Price of Good Service: Columbus Would Have Loved This

Some months ago, a PG&E service guy noted a small gas leak in one of the pipes leading to an insert I had installed into a fireplace in our living room. "You should get this fixed", he said, "it's costing you money."

I dismissed the seriousness of the the warning, yet on the porch leading to the front door, in the months that followed, we would get a waft of the smell of gas.

Last Saturday, as another serviceman was doing routine inspections on our street, he again noted the leak, but as I spoke to him, he added "There's something else going on here and I've called another guy with more sophisticated equipment who can verify exactly where more gas is leaking from." About 45 minutes later, a second service guy appeared and aiming some kind of "clicking" device at the wall said, "You have a serious leak in the pipe leading through your foundation. This is a hazardous situation and we have to shut off your gas immediately. Call a reputable licenced plumber to fix it. When it's done, call us back and we'll turn the gas on immediately."

"Shit. Big bucks", I thought and cursed my fate. I scrambled through the Yellow Pages, and found a plumber with a proven reputation, but when I called, I got a message telling me they were "out for lunch." It was Saturday, and I thought "They're  probably out till Monday", so I plotted how we would manage without gas and hot water till then, and thanked God for the microwave.

Meanwhile, I spoke to my neighbor, Steve, who often has contractors of all types working on his house if he knew a guy who could replace the leaking pipe. "I know a guy, Braulio. He can do it for you. I'll call him right now. It was Sunday. When Braulio called me he mumbled some stuff, barely audible, about coming out to see the problem. Hours passed. Nothing. So about 6PM, he again called and said he was lost and something about his brother. I was pissed. "This guy is probably another of these unreliable dudes, not too interested in making money." I decided to wait for the guy from the Yellow Pages to call on Monday. He did, bright and early (7:45 a.m.), assuring he an estimator would call me "Soon." About 11:00 no call. So I called the outift again. "Oh, we'll call him again. He should get a hold of you soon." Well, he did. Five minutes later he called. "I'm on my way."

Meanwhile, I see this Mexican guy in a pickup pull up next door, with two other guys, who walked to Steve's house. "Oh, no", I mumbled, "This is probaby Braulio!" It was. Now, I would have two plumbers there at the same time! Luckily, the other guy took about 15 minutes to get to my place, giving time for Braulio to size up the situation." As the other guy arrived, Braulio walked past him saying "I gotta' make un delivery. I call ju soon." When the Yellow Page guy finished his inspection he announced, "It'll cost you about $500." I was broken. "I'll think about it", I said, "and call you back later." He left.

10 minutes later, Braulio called. "Can you fix the pipe? How much?" "How mush di oder guy wan'?" I hesitated. "500." "Thas' mucho dinero", he said. "How much will you charge me? " A pause. "Hunder fifti." I contracted him on the spot! "When?" "Ahorita." And 15 minutes later, Braulio was there with his two helpers and promptly got to work. Thank God for Mexicans! A couple of hours later, the job was done, and I threw in an extra fifty bucks for his helpers. Braulio was grateful.

Now, came the easy stuff: call PG&E and they'd send a guy right away to turn on my gas. When I called the 800 number, I got a recording, of course, that prompted me to Press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish, 3 for that, 4 for something else, and "If this is correct Press 8", after each one etc. etc. etc. I was finally told to "wait" while a representative spoke to me. When he got on the line, he promptly asked me to repeat all the information I had just finished punching into the recorded prompts!!! "This is just to verify that what you entered is correct", he said in an appeasing tone. "How long is the pipe you replaced?" He asked. "About 4 ft. long." "Oh, you will need to call the CITY and get them to do an INSPECTION on it, before our serviceman can turn on you gas." "But I was told nothing about any CITY inspection!", I complained. "I'm sorry, sir." "I'll give you the number?"

So after reaching another recording at CITY HALL, telling me to Press 1 for English, 2 for Spanish, and to press 3 for this, and 4 for that, and 5 for something else, the voice finally "asked" me to enter my Building Permit Number on my claim! I only wanted an INSPECTION, but no, evidently I had to get a Building Permit, BEFORE they could even do an inspection. But the job was already done!? Being still early, I decided to drive downtown to CITY HALL and speak to LIVE PERSON and get all this shit straightened out.

But when I got there, the parking lot and all the spaces were empty. Then, I remembered. "OH SHIT IT'S GOD DAMMNED COLUMBUS DAY!!

In a fury, I called PG&E again when I got home, determined to speak to the president if necessary. I figured out a way to get a REAL PERSON right away and I related my plight to her, trying my best to win her pity and compassion. It worked! "Mr. Rios, I don't see why you need a CITY inspection at all. I will put in a request to have your gas turned on, but let me see... ummm, looks like we don't have a service man available until next... Monday?" I exploded! "Next Monday???" She must have sensed my desperation, so she put me on hold while she checked further. When she came on the line again after about three minutes, she uttered, "We'll send someone out today. He'll be there no later than 8pm is that OK?"

Two hours later, the service man knocked on my door, ran some pressure checks, and announced "Look's good, Mr. Rios", and promptly turned on my gas!

Now, that's what I call "service." Now, I'm really looking forward to a good, HOT shower but I just wanted to finish this, first.

A Sneak Preview to the Cover of My New Book

No wonder I'm 70 something and still haven't published a book! It's a lot of work. When I started this project I had little idea what I was getting into. Some years back I began writing stories about my childhood, growing up in a small Barrio in Modesto, California during the 40s and 50s with no real direction. I began reading them for audiences and got enthusiastic responses from them.

In a few years, I had some 15 or so stories and a large collection of poems but still no real order to them all. When my E-Buddy, William Snyder, recently published his book "The Eight-Fingered Criminal's Son", I bought and read a copy and laughed all the way through it! His stories of a childhood growing up in Los Angeles sounded so much like mine! If he could do it, so could I!

Bill, by the way, has been one of my most ardent Chican-izmo fans and has constantly urged me to publish a book, so in part, I owe the effort to him. Putting the stories into some kind of cohesive order was the first step. They were not in chronological order, but on a closer look, I began to see that they kind of were. So that took a lot of time. As that began to happen, I noted gaps in the stories, holes that need to be filled in so I wrote new stories to fill them. Now a definite chronology began to emerge.

But the real killer has been the editing! I began ambitiously attacking the grammar, punctuation and sentence structures and soon got caught up in the style, the tone, adding a detail here and there, deleting wordy and repititious structures, again and again, and soon I became mired! When does it end? When is a story finished?

I am self-publishing through an online company Bill referred to me. So far, they have been quite easy to work with. Evidently, Indie books are the coming thing. Self-publishing is a bit like paying someone to tell you they love you, shameless, and a little self serving but what the hell.

I can't tell you how many times I have told someone "I want to write a book, some day." To the point where I was saying it just so people wouldn't think I was just another lazy artist. It appears that soon I will be able to actually say "Oh, by the way, I'm an author." Sounds good, huh?

My book attempts to capture the life of Mexican immigrants finding their way in a foreign world, their hopes, their dreams, their tragedies and and especially, their triumphs. I am hoping it will be available in November, and I will keep you abreast of that in future posts.

By the way, the image on the cover of the book is a from an old black and white photo of me when I was a about five, with my dog, Skippy, the grinning dog. There is a complimentary story of him in the book.

Read, Mis Amigos, Read

It's been years since I have read one of Castaneda's books and I picked this up a few weeks ago, one I had never really read, and began. It didn't take me long to get "hooked" again as I first was when I picked up "The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowlege", sometime in the early 70's.

Like so many at the time, I was completely and forever blown away by the stories of magic and the possiblity of other worlds, other existences, other ways of seeing the world, "a separate reality" as Carlos often puts it.

But in this one I miss the appearance of the Brujos (sorcerers) Don Juan, and his magical sidekick, Genaro. I'm not sure how many books there are in total, but some eight or nine? All telling of the amazing encounters Carlos had with the other world, in the deserts of central Mexico. He was a graduate student doing his thesis on the use of medicinal herbs among the Yaqui Indians of the Southwest, and in a Greyhound bus depot he meets an old Yaqui man he called "Don Juan", asking him if he might know someone who can tell him about medicinal plants. Don Juan says no, but he himself has "a little knowledge"
of their use, the qunitessential understatement of modern times!

The books are somewhat chronological, and I suggest reading them in order if possible, because they document Carlos first encounters with the magical world of sorcerers, his initiation into to it, and his clumsy and frightening journey to becoming what Don Juan and Genaro call a "man of knowledge." The power and beauty of their "teachings" compares to any of the ideas of the modern Western world of philosophy and psychology.

By the time this book is written, Carlos finally realizes that he was not alone in his intitiation, but part of a group of apprentices, 4 women and 3 men, although he had met them before briefly. What a movie this would make, putting modern psychological thrillers to shame! Carlos is a master at detailing the supreme fears and terrors he experiences, his stupidity and his debililitating clinging to his reason in the face of the inexplicable.

Anyway, I am glad to be reading again. I was an avid reader in my youth and years have passed since I have picked a book, and actually read it, so it feels good, a sense of accomplishment. I also just finished reading "Letters to a Young Poet", by Rainer Maria Rilke, a book I had been introduced to by my college philosophy instructor. Rilke's message seems simple: Find courage in your solitude, embrace it because from it you grow stronger.

It is tragic that today there seems to be fewer and fewer readers. I had to labor ceaselessly to get my students to read an essay or even a short story! And I was dismayed when they would confess, with a measure of glee, "This is the first book I have read in my whole life", or "This is the first book I read all the way through, "Mr. Rivers."

I hope this reawakening to the pleasures of reading in me, is not a passing fancy but hangs around for a while longer.

My New Book

Me an my dog, Skippy CA.1934

Pictured here is my grinning dog, Skippy and I when I was about 5 in the front yard of my home in a small barrio in Modesto, California. It will be used on the cover of my new book, "Songs From The Barrio: A Coming of Age in Modesto, CA."

The book will be composed of stories and poems that document my experiences growing up during the 40's, 50's and 60's, in "Juarez", as we jokingly called our barrio in South Modesto, a one-city-square block of a dozen or so, houses of Mexican immigrant familys

The people who lived there were all Mexican immigrants, poor and uneducated, who left Mexico in the 1920's after its devastating Mexican Revolution (1910-20), and came here legally and illegally to better their lives and those of their children.

But they brought with them a vibrant language and culture and they kept it alive the best they could in competition with the powerful pull of Americanization. Slowly, their kids assimilated, forgot most of their culture and moved to the Northside,or out of town in search of jobs and the American Dream.

We grew up poor though the old timers felt rich, when compared to what little they left behind in Mexico. Our barrio's streets were unpaved, unlit and unmarked but we played in them nonetheless. Everyone knew everyone by name, being related or comadres or compadres of one another, having baptized one anothers kids. The houses were divided by wire fences and they could see and gossip with neighbors on both sides, in contrast to the 6' tall wooden fences we use today, sheltering our lives from those of our neighbor's.

We underwent our own form of discrimination covert, and often overt, to the point that some of us were ashamed to call ourselves "Mexican", preferring the title "Spanish" instead. College never entered our vocabulary. Most of us quit school, got a job, had kids, and a handful graduated from high school.

It was another time and another world then and I felt the need to document it now, before it's completely gone, for my kids, my grandkids and my family and for any reader hungry to learn how America became the Melting Pot that it is, though some of us refused to melt, completely. The barrio needs to be assigned its rightful place in the history of California and the United States. Not only that, but I'm an old fart now, and time is passing. I can't screw around. It's now or never.

While I have been writing since the mid-1960's, I have toyed with the idea of some time publishing a book. Many of the book's stories were already written, but as I began to edit and organize them into the idea of a book, I saw holes and gaps and set out to write those stories.

Keep tuned in and I will try to update you on the book's progress. I will be uploading the manuscript to the publisher in a few weeks, I hope. Wish me luck and I hope you'll buy a book when its ready. You owe it to me for all the hard work.

A Book is Being Born

I've not posted for a while as my energy has been going into the organization, planning and writing of what I hope will turn out to be a book about my life growing up in a small Mexican Barrio in South Modesto (CA), during the 40's, 50's and 60's. Inspired by, and on the heels of my Blogger Buddy's Bill Snyder's recent book "The Eight-Fingered Criminal's Son", (read it, it's a riot), and with his encouragement, I am looking to getting my own book published soon.

Most of the stories have already been written over the past half-dozen years and at first the book was going to be a random collection of recollections, but now I see that it needs some kind of chronology establishing a beginning, a middle, and an end. I have read many of them in public and gotten enthusiastic responses to them.

I'm feeling a sense of urgency because as you might have guessed, I am no Spring Chicken and life is quickly passing me by and the things I write about need to preserve what life was like during this time period and what part Mexicans, and these barrios had in forming the diversity of American Culture. I want to document this for my reader, for myself and for my children and grandchildren.

"Don't ever forget where you come from", my mom used to say. Mom, I haven't.

Updates will follow. Meanwhile, any encouragement would be appreciated. If not "I will understand", like hell. It kills me when people write crap on Facebook, and then ask you to repost on your own status adding that if you don't, they will understand. Yeah, you're a jerk if you don't repost.