The Brick People by Alejandro Morales

First published: 1988

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: The 1890’s to the 1940’s

Locale: Southern California

Principal Characters:

• Octavio Revueltas, a worker in the Simons brickyard
• Nana de León Revueltas, a strong worker, mother, and wife
• Walter Simons, the son of the brick company’s founder
• Malaquias de León, one of the first workers to arrive at the newly built brickyard
• Rosendo Guerrero, the worker who lays out the plan of the original brickyard
• Arturo Revueltas, the eldest son of Octavio and Nana

The Novel

Based in part on the actual experiences of the author’s parents (to whom the book is dedicated), The Brick People is the story of several generations of Anglo and Chicano/Mexicano families and their interactions in Southern California in the first half of the twentieth century. The principal clans are the Simons and the Revueltas families, representing the capitalist and working classes respectively.

The novel begins in 1892, with Rosendo Guerrero laying out the ground plan for the original Simons brickyard in Pasadena, California. The coordinates of the plan are based on an Aztec mandala, suggesting that the legacy of the indigenous cultures of the region lie buried under the ground. This idea is reinforced by the figure of Doña Eulalia, who identifies with an ancient oak tree and who turns into millions of brown insects upon her death.

Joseph Simons, the eldest son of Reuben Simons, the brick-making dynasty’s founder, makes every attempt to keep his workers complacent. One of his greatest concerns is the worldwide increase in radical unionism. When a mass grave of Chinese workers is found on the brickyard grounds, Joseph notifies the authorities and orders that the bodies be burned so as to preclude any labor unrest. Joseph’s relationship with his younger brother Walter is strained at best; he finds Walter to be arrogant and at odds with his own political views. A third brother, Orin Elmer, is a physical and intellectual weakling who is unable to participate in the family business.

Walter Simons is an “enlightened capitalist” who seeks to understand Mexican culture in order to make better use of his workers. On the suggestion of Rosendo Guerrero, Walter undertakes a fact-finding trip to Mexico, where he experiences firsthand the daily workings of U.S. imperialism under the dictator Porfirio Díaz. In the state of Chihuahua, he confers with William Randolph Hearst and other California businesspeople and witnesses the abuses of the hacienda system, including a massacre of peasants by government forces.

Upon Walter’s return, the Simons company begins construction on a new brickyard in the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello. In the wake of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, demands for building materials increase dramatically; the Simons business expands at an incredible rate. Rosendo decides to promote one of his workers, Gonzalo Pedroza, to the status of foreman. Gonzalo will become one of the most powerful and hated figures at the brickyard. The arrival of Malaquias de León and his family marks a significant moment in the history of the brickyard, for it coincides with the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the tremendous rise in immigration to the United States, and the dissemination of socialist and communist ideology throughout the Southwest. Orin Elmer’s death (and the consumption of his body by brown insects) marks an end to the initial stage of the narrative.

The tension between the Simons brothers, Joseph and Walter, is aggravated when the two compete for economic control of the family assets. Walter’s decision to build a home in Los Angeles essentially makes him an absentee owner at the Montebello brickyard, where recently arrived workers from Mexico are becoming more politicized. The departure of Malaquias de León coincides with the increased importance of Octavio Revueltas, who marries Malaquias’s daughter, Nana, in 1926. The stockmarket crash of 1929 and the resulting Depression worsen economic conditions for the entire country. Some of the Simons workers (with Octavio as their leader) establish contact with various union organizers, despite harassment from the Simons family and the foreman Gonzalo Pedroza. The Long Beach earthquake of 1933 marks the symbolic end of the boom in the brick industry, since newer and more reliable building materials have been invented.

The Simons workers finally walk out, but the strike is broken with use of poor African American workers. The Simons workers break ranks, some of them return to work, other are reduced to desperation and cynicism. The events of World War II overshadow whatever problems had existed previously: Mexican Americans serve proudly in the U.S. military, Japanese Americans are interned, the Zoot Suit riots (in which Anglo sailors attacked Chicanos) break out in Los Angeles, and Simons workers leave the brickyard to take jobs in wartime industries. Once outside the walls of the yard, Mexican families experience racial discrimination with regard to housing and bank loans. The Revueltas family is forced to move back to the home of Octavio’s parents. News arrives of Walter Simons’s death by choking on brown insects.

The final chapter consists of Octavio’s memories of his family’s original journey north from Mexico. The novel ends on an optimistic note: The Revueltas family is building a new home and moving ever so tentatively into the middle class.

The Characters

Octavio is a complex character who gambles compulsively and who is often absent from his family, yet he commands the respect of most readers for his sense of social justice and his dedication to his children. He functions as the radicalized worker who decides to fight the exploitation to which he has been subjected, and he provides an opportunity for the reader to learn something about the multiethnic unions that existed in Southern California throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s. Octavio is the first-generation immigrant whose children will live better than he did thanks in large part to their parents’ hard work.

As a child, Nana de León Revueltas experiences discrimination because of her family’s poverty; at one point, she meets and identifies with an African American baseball player. Once married to Octavio, she provides a solid base for her family even as she struggles to better their living conditions by making contacts outside the closed circle of Simons workers. In many ways, she is a proto-feminist character who insists upon equal status with her husband, though always within the limits of traditional Mexican values.

Walter Simons inherits a family business from wealthy parents. Unlike his brother Joseph, Walter attempts to understand Mexican culture, not because he is socially progressive but because he wants to know how to better manage his workers. He believes that if the brickyard satisfies the basic needs of the workers and their families, the threat of unionism and strikes will not arise. As a representative of “benign capitalism,” Walter is the ideological foil to Octavio Revueltas and the union movement.

Malaquias de León is a precursor to Octavio’s radicalism in that he is the first character who challenges the arrangement at the brickyard and decides to leave its confines in order to seek economic independence.

Rosendo Guerrero functions as a vehicle for the indigenous elements of Chicano/Mexicano culture. He is in touch with the ancient traditions and myths that periodically assert themselves over and against the rationalization of society by capitalism and Anglo puritanism.

Arturo Revueltas represents the younger generation in the novel, already anglicized to a certain extent and less familiar with Mexican traditions. His difficulty with language learning typifies the problems of all children of non-English-speaking immigrants, yet the novel presents bilingualism itself as a gift.

Critical Context

The Brick People, Alejandro Morales’s fourth novel, is undoubtedly his most personal in that it is a fictionalized account of his parents’ life. Unlike his earlier texts, which often have a fragmented structure, The Brick People is organized as a relatively straightforward historical novel; it follows the chronology of the early twentieth century with references to key events such as the Great Depression and World War II. The combination of historical fact and elements of fantasy places the novel in the Magical Realist tradition of contemporary Latin American literature associated with Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and others.

Morales was one of the first Chicano novelists at a time (the late 1970’s) when Chicano literature was not yet accepted as an important area of American studies. Chicano texts were not included in the curriculum of major universities; Chicano writers and scholars in many English and Spanish departments were greeted with outright hostility. In a real sense, Morales’s role in the U.S. academy was to be one of the founders of an emergent discipline. By the time The Brick People appeared (written entirely in English), Chicano literature enjoyed an international readership and academic respectability, and Morales was counted among the most influential Chicano critics and writers of fiction.

Bibliography

Gutierrez-Jones, Carl. “Resisting Cultural Dependency: The Manipulation of Surveillance and Paranoia in Alejandro Morales’s The Brick People.” The Americas Review 22 (Spring-Summer, 1994): 230-243. Gutierrez-Jones discusses The Brick People in terms of the fear experienced by many U.S. citizens in the aftermath of the signing of pan-American trade agreements. His commentary focuses on the Mexican workers living in a small town and their interactions with factory workers.

Hernández, Roberto E. “The Brick People.” Vista Magazine (November 27, 1988): 14. Short summary of the novel, with special attention paid to the characters Nana and Octavio Revueltas. Hernández is troubled by Morales’s “fascination with the grotesque.” Nevertheless, he recommends: “The Brick People should be read by Americans of all walks of life, but it will strike a familiar note in those of us who came to North America in the hope of finding more than one alternative to life.”

Marquez, Antonio. “The Use and Abuse of History in Alejandro Morales’s The Brick People and The Rag Doll Plagues.” Bilingual Review 20 (September, 1995): 76-85. Marquez declares that the focus of his study “is on Morales’s post-modernist tack” and the relationship between history and literature. The Brick People and The Rag Doll Plagues are historical narratives which blend myth and history in order to tell “a larger story.”

Morales, Alejandro. Interview by Yves Charles Grandjeat and Alfonso Rodríguez. Confluencia 7 (Fall, 1991): 109-114. Morales talks about his interest in history, the construction of Chicano identity, and the social responsibility of the writer. His remarks on The Brick People are especially interesting.

Morales, Alejandro. Interview by José Antonio Gurpegui. Bilingual Review 20 (September, 1995): 5-13. Morales discusses his views on Chicano literature, the ethnic influence of Chicano literature on the whole body of American literature, and his reason for the shift from Spanish to English works.