The Valley by Rolando Hinojosa

First published:The Valley (1983; revised from Estampas del valle y otras obras/ Sketches of the Valley and Other Works, 1973)

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1920’s to the 1970’s

Locale: The Texas-Mexico border

Principal Characters:

• Rafa Buenrostro, the autobiographical protagonist of many of the sketches
• Don Manuel Guzmán, a former revolutionary modeled after Hinojosa’s father
• Jehú Malacra, the son of Tere Noriega and Roque Malacra, orphaned at an early age
• Aunt Chedes Briones, Jehú Malacra’s aunt, who helps to rear the orphaned boy
• Don Víctor, a former revolutionary connected with the circus
• Gilberto Castañeda, the husband of Marta Cordero, whose brother, Baldemar, he sees murder Ernesto Tamez
• Baldemar Cordero, Gilberto’s friend and brother-in-law
• Ernesto Tamez, a man stabbed to death by Baldemar Cordero

The Novel

This collection of sketches about Rolando Hinojosa’s fictional Belken County, situated just north of the Mexican border in Texas, was Hinojosa’s first major publication. Originally, it was rendered in Spanish with English translations by Gustávo Valadéz and José Reyna under the title Estampas del valle y otras obras/Sketches of the Valley and Other Works. Hinojosa himself translated it under the present title in 1983, adding some material and a set of photographs from his family album. The collection constitutes a novel by some definitions of the term, but it also is the first major segment of Hinojosa’s evolving multivolume “Klail City Death Trip” series. Hinojosa focuses on the area around his birthplace, Mercedes, Texas (Klail City in his series). In these sketches, he attempts to capture the ambience of the area and its people.

The Valley lacks the real plot, the dramatic climax, the carefully planned denouement, and the clearly identifiable protagonist found in conventional novels. Nevertheless, it contains pervasive characters, including the frequent narrator, Rafa Buenrostro, the biographical details of whose life closely approximate Hinojosa’s. It also presents Jehú Malacra, seen through many eyes at various stages of his development. The last pages of the book, “A Life of Rafa Buenrostro,” focus on Rafa.

Three early sketches—a total of twenty-three printed lines—focus on Rafa’s early school experience and evoke the sense of separation Mexican American children feel from their Anglo classmates and teachers. The three paragraphs that constitute these sketches are not directly related to one another. Rather, each provides a snapshot of something connected with that early school experience: the teacher, Miss Moy, is described in five lines; a Hispanic girl lies about what she had for breakfast to make herself seem more like her Anglo classmates (eight lines); Rafa punches Hilario Berrago in the mouth during recess (ten lines).

From these school sketches, Hinojosa moves directly to a short vignette about a man from the water company coming to shut off the Ponce family’s water supply because they have not paid their bill. The next sketch moves to a neighboring town, Flora, and has no direct connection with what has preceded it.

A six-line sketch follows telling about how in Edgerton the narrator’s father had once fired three shots at a man who was trying to knife him. As these sketches unfold, readers, probably at first bewildered at encountering unfamiliar characters in unfamiliar towns, begin to develop a sense of the region about which Hinojosa is writing. The individual sketches may lack plot, yet from them emerge details useful elsewhere throughout this book and the others of the “Klail City Death Trip” series.

One sustained narrative among the sketches focuses on Baldemar (Balde) Cordero’s fatal stabbing of Ernesto Tamez in a barroom brawl. Balde’s friend, Gilberto (Beto) Castañeda, is married to Balde’s sister, Marta. They all live together in Klail City. Beto, witness to the stabbing, gives a deposition recounting what happened. Through it, readers learn the backgrounds of Balde and Beto and of other characters they have previously encountered in the book. A sketch of Beto Castañeda follows.

Some characters in this collection emerge more fully developed in subsequent volumes of the series. Jehú Malacra is a typical example. In this book, readers first meet Jehú’s grandfather, an unnamed narrator, and his long-dead great-grandfather, Braulio Tapia. Jehú’s father, Roque Malacra, visits the narrator, a widower, requesting his daughter Tere Noriega’s hand in marriage.

In fewer than twenty lines, the narrator consents to this request and reflects upon his having visited Braulio Tapia many years before seeking permission to marry Braulio’s daughter Matilde, Tere’s mother. He also recalls that Braulio’s wife, doña Sóstenes, was dead when he approached his prospective father-in-law, as the narrator’s wife is dead when Roque approaches him.

In these parallel circumstances, one senses the recurrence of human events that is part of continuance in a county such as Belken. Hinojosa’s family lived in the South Texas area from the 1740’s and became “accidental” American citizens in 1845, when the boundary between Mexico and the United States was redrawn a few miles south of where they had previously lived as Mexicans. The Valley and subsequent volumes follow Jehú Malacra from his birth through his childhood, his war experiences, and his rise as an officer in the local bank and second husband of Becky Escobar, to whom Hinojosa later devotes a full volume, Becky and Her Friends (1990).

The Characters

Rafa Buenrostro, the autobiographical narrator of many of the sketches, is a splendid observer. Secure in his identity, he understands the people around him in Hinojosa’s Belken County. He also is ambitious and knows something of the world outside Belken’s circumscribed boundaries. He has served in the Korean War and is planning to attend the University of Texas at Austin; he also benefits from his position as the youngest son in a family of five. Rafa does more reporting than judging. He appreciates the circumstances of Belken County’s Mexican American citizens and understands the lapses and missteps they make.

Jehú Malacra is depicted from birth to young manhood. Losing his parents early, he is reared partly by Aunt Chedes Briones and grows up with his three cousins, Édu, Pepe, and Vicky. Vicky Briones distresses her mother by joining the circus, but her doing so enables Jehú to work with don Víctor in transporting circus props from town to town. Jehú becomes a solid citizen in Hinojosa’s later volumes and also develops into a person of some integrity who challenges his boss at the bank. In this volume, readers see Jehú as a circus roustabout and message carrier as he wrestles with the dilemmas people face reaching adulthood.

Emilio Tamez is presented in a brief sketch as someone to whom bad things happen. He lost his right ear in a barroom brawl, but before that, at age eleven, he slipped as he was jumping from wagon to wagon, injuring himself badly enough that he still limps. He can read and write in both Spanish and English, but, according to Hinojosa, he is stupid. He receives considerable abuse.

Ernesto Tamez’s relationship to Emilio is unclear. Balde Cordero kills Ernesto in a bar in Klail City. It is evident, however, that Ernesto is related to Emilio, and one character states that Ernesto’s family is “an odd bunch.”

Balde Cordero stabs Ernesto, but because he is drunk at the time, he does not remember doing so. The implication is that Balde, who is sentenced to fifteen years in prison for murder, is as much a victim as Ernesto.

One sketch entitled “Don Manuel Guzmán” is about Hinojosa’s father, who appears in other sketches throughout the book. The father owned three cleaning establishments and part of a bakery. Loyal to the Mexican government, he finally became a policeman in the Mexican district of Klail City and is presented as an ex-revolutionary who matures into a solid citizen. Don Manuel represents a man poised between two cultures, but he is clearly a genuine part of only one of them: He is Mexican to the core.

Braulio Tapia, mentioned briefly in an early sketch bearing his name but relating the story of his son and granddaughter, is presented more fully in a later historical sketch, one of the few that delves into Belken County’s history as a part of Mexico. Hinojosa depicts don Braulio, born in 1883, as a revolutionary of the same ilk as don Manuel, who knew Pancho Villa and Álvaro Obregon personally.

Don Víctor is part of the revolution, a Mexican lieutenant colonel married to a Mexican Jew. After she, their son, and their unborn child die of Spanish influenza in 1920, however, the grief-stricken don Víctor ends up in Belken County with the circus. In don Víctor, as in most of his other characters, Hinojosa, providing minimal information, demonstrates how people evolve into what they are.

Critical Context

The 1960’s were crucial to Rolando Hinojosa’s development as a writer. He completed a five-year stint as a high school teacher and factory laborer in Brownsville, Texas, and in 1962 began graduate studies at New Mexico Highlands University, receiving the master’s degree in 1963. He then moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana for doctoral work.

Hinojosa and his wife arrived in Illinois just before the strident racial uprisings of the 1960’s, a period that focused attention upon the problems of blacks. Out of this period grew a hospitable atmosphere for black protest literature and, subsequently, for black literature that had been produced earlier. In this climate, all minority literatures began to be encouraged and reevaluated.

Just before completing the doctorate, Hinojosa took a teaching job at San Antonio’s Trinity University, where, fortunately, he came under the influence of Tomás Rivera. Rivera encouraged Hinojosa’s writing, urging him to submit a manuscript to the Quinto Sol competition, which Rivera had won in 1970. Hinojosa submitted the original version of The Valley, which took the prize in 1972 and resulted in the book’s publication the following year.

Bibliography

Akers, John C. “From Translation to Rewriting: Rolando Hinojosa’s The Valley.” Americas Review 21 (Spring, 1993): 91-102. Akers analyzes The Valley, the English version of his first published fiction Estampas del valle y otras obras. He compares this novel with other Spanish works and their English versions, and presents a useful study of the structural, linguistic, and thematic aspects of the English version.

Hinojosa, Rolando. “Chicano Literature: An American Literature in Transition.” In The Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature, edited by Francisco Jiménez. New York: Bilingual Press, 1979. Hinojosa contrasts the interest in black writing to that in Hispanic writing. He foresees a developing interest in Chicano literature. His predictions have proved accurate.

Hinojosa, Rolando. “This Writer’s Sense of Place.” In The Texas Literary Tradition: Fiction, Folklore, History, edited by Don Graham, James W. Lee, and William T. Pilkington. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Hinojosa discusses how he transformed the area where he grew up into his fictional county. One senses here the dichotomy he felt as a part of two cultures. Schooled to value his heritage, he could not, however escape Hispanic-Anglo tensions.

Leal, Luis. “History and Memory in Estampas del valle.” In The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Historical and Critical, edited by José David Saldívar. Houston: Arté Publico Press, 1985. Deals with how Hinojosa structured his memories of childhood to formulate his novel. Also shows how local history infuses Hinojosa’s writing.

Hinojosa, Rolando. “Our Southwest: An Interview with Rolando Hinojosa.” In The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Critical and Historical, edited by José D. Saldívar. Houston: Arté Publico Press, 1985. In this interview, Hinojosa talks about the evolution of his work. He acknowledges his debt to Tomás Rivera, who encouraged him to offer his work for publication. The piece is valuable in that it traces the progression of Hinojosa’s writing.

Saldívar, José D. “Rolando Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip: A Critical Introduction.” In The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Historical and Critical, edited by José David Saldívar. Houston: Arté Publico Press, 1985. This essay provides an overall assessment of the “Klail City Death Trip” series and illustrates how Hinojosa conceives of his work. Useful for Hinojosa’s comments on local color.