Salem Press

	When the police left, we came back and some of the nationals made up stories of how they were almost caught--how they outraced the police. Some of the stories were so convoluted and unconvincing that everyone laughed mentiras, especially when one described how he overpowered a policeman, took his gun away, and sold the patrol car. We laughed and laughed, happy to be there to make up a story.
- from Black Hair

Notable Latino Writers
Gary Soto

Born: Fresno, California; April 12, 1952

Poetry: The Elements of San Joaquin, 1977; The Tale of Sunlight, 1978; Where Sparrows Work Hard, 1981; Black Hair, 1985; Who Will Know Us?, 1990; A Fire in My Hands, 1990; Home Course in Religion, 1991; New and Selected Poems, 1995; A Natural Man, 1999; One Kind of Faith, 2003.

Long Fiction: Nickel and Dime, 2000; Poetry Lover, 2001; Amnesia in a Republican County, 2003.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: Baseball in April, and Other Stories, 1990; Taking Sides, 1991; Neighborhood Odes, 1992 (poetry); Pacific Crossing, 1992; The Skirt, 1992; Too Many Tamales, 1993; Local News, 1993; Crazy Weekend, 1994; Jesse, 1994; Boys at Work, 1995; Canto Familiar, 1995 (poetry); The Cat's Meow, 1995; Chato's Kitchen, 1995; Off and Running, 1996; Buried Onions, 1997; Novio Boy, 1997 (play); Petty Crimes, 1998; Big Bushy Mustache, 1998; Chato Throws a Pachanga, 1999; Chato and the Party Animals, 1999; Nerdlania, 1999 (play); Jesse De La Cruz: A Profile of a United Farm Worker, 2000; My Little Car, 2000; Body Parts in Rebellion: Hanging Out with Fernie and Me, 2002 (poetry); If the Shoe Fits, 2002; The Afterlife, 2003; Chato Goes Cruisin', 2004.

Nonfiction: Living up the Street: Narrative Recollections, 1985; Small Faces, 1986; Lesser Evils: Ten Quartets, 1988; A Summer Life, 1990 (39 short vignettes based on his life); The Effect of Knut Hamsun on a Fresno Boy, 2000.

EDITED TEXTS: California Childhood: Recollections and Stories of the Golden State, 1988; Pieces of the Heart: New Chicano Fiction, 1993.

Gary Soto (GA-ree SOH-toh), who has been called one of the finest natural talents among Mexican American writers, was born on April 12, 1952, to Manuel and Angie (Trevino) Soto. Although his parents were born in the United States, Soto's grandfather, Frank Soto, immigrated there to escape economic and political instability in Mexico. He met his future wife, Paola, in Fresno. Soto's parents and grandparents were members of the working class. Every day, the Soto family would join other Mexican American families from their barrio in Fresno and travel to the lush San Joaquin Valley to pick grapes and oranges. At a young age, Gary experienced the grimness of working in mind-deadening, physically exhausting labor, picking cotton in the fields, collecting aluminum cans, all to help his family survive. The lushness of the valley juxtaposed with the backbreaking labor his family had to endure because of their poverty would figure prominently in Soto's poetry and fiction.

What to Read: A Summer Life

A Summer Life (1990) is a collection of thirty-nine vignettes based on Gary Soto's life in California. The book is arranged in three sections covering his early childhood, preadolescence, and the time prior to adulthood. Soto's Latino heritage forms a background, and he identifies himself with this community in his descriptions of everyday realities: his grandfather's wallet is "machine tooled with MEXICO and a campesino and donkey climbing a hill"; his mother pounds "a round steak into carne asada" and crushes "a heap of beans into refritos." Soto's experiences include the sounds of Spanish and the objects of the barrio, but they seem universal. At heart, the book is a child's movement toward self-awareness.

In the first section, his world is bounded by his neighborhood and his eyes see this world in the sharp, concrete images of childhood. "I was four and already at night thinking of the past," he writes, "The cat with a sliver in his eye came and went. . . . the three sick pups shivered and blinked twilight in their eyes . . . the next day they rolled over into their leaf-padded graves."

In the last story in A Summer Life, "The River," Soto is seventeen, and it is the 1960's, the hippie era. He and his friend Scott have traveled to Los Angeles to find themselves amid the "mobs of young people in leather vests, bell-bottoms, beads, Jesus thongs, tied-dyed shirts, and crowns of flowers." As the two of them bed down that night in an uncle's house, Soto seems to find that instant between childhood and adulthood, between the past and the present: "I thought of Braley Street and family, some of whom were now dead, and how when Uncle returned from the Korean War, he slept on a cot on the sunporch. . . . We had yet to go and come back from our war and find ourselves a life other than the one we were losing." In this moment, Soto speaks for all readers who recall that thin edge between yesterday and today.

Diane Andrews Henningfeld

When Soto was five years old, tragedy struck his family; Manuel Soto died as a result of a factory accident at the age of twenty-seven. The father's death left Soto's mother to raise him, his older brother, Rick, and his younger sister Debra. Manuel's death created financial and emotional hardships for the family. They never discussed his death, never dealt with their individual or communal grief. The silence created an emotional chasm for Gary. The effects of Soto's father's death have become a key issue in Soto's writings as he attempts to reconcile his love for his father and his feelings of abandonment with the numbing effects of silence.

Soto grew up in a Catholic family and attended Catholic and private schools. However, his family never stressed the importance of obtaining an education or had books in the house or encouraged him to read. His mother and father left high school to get married when they were eighteen. Even though Soto received no encouragement at home to work hard in school, he did graduate from high school in 1970 and enrolled in Fresno City College to avoid the draft.

A key event occurred in Soto's life after enrolling in college. While browsing through the college library, he discovered a collection of poems titled The New American Poetry. After reading several of the poems, he immediately began writing poetry and discovered his poetic voice. He had found his niche.

Seeking the companionship and intellectualism of other writers, Soto transferred to California State University, Fresno, and enrolled in Philip Levine's creative writing class. This decision was life-altering. From 1972 to 1973, Levine nurtured and encouraged Soto's talent as a poet. As he created more poetry under the tutelage of Levine, Soto began to discover his own sense of aloneness, a feeling of being alienated from two cultures, his own because of his education and the Anglo world, which both encouraged and rejected him. Through his writings, he delves into the theme of alienation and learns that it is a human, universal emotion that is not particular to him.

In 1974, Soto graduated magna cum laude from California State University, Fresno. In 1975 he married Carolyn Oda, a native of Fresno and the daughter of Japanese-American farmers who had been imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. At first, his family opposed their marriage, hoping he would marry a good Mexican American girl. Soto discusses their initial reaction and eventual consent in one of his prose memoirs, Small Faces. Five years after they were married, Carolyn gave birth to their daughter, Mariko.

Soto earned a master's degree in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine in 1976. He then became writer-in-residence at San Diego State University but left to become a lecturer in the Chicano studies department at the University of California at Berkeley. There, in 1977 he received an associate professorship in both Chicano studies and English. In 1992 he became a senior lecturer in the English department.

While fulfilling his teaching responsibilities, Soto continued to write poetry. In 1977 his first volume of poetry, The Elements of San Joaquin, a book he dedicated in part to his grandmother, was published and earned several literary awards. In this volume, Soto gives voice to the grim, impoverished, violent, and soul-deadening world of his childhood: a world that was often filled with human suffering caused by his family's poverty and their inability to become upwardly mobile. He conveys his feelings by using a street as a major motif. Although the street implies movement and a journey, Soto uses the street to imply a dead-end existence on the mean streets of his neighborhood.

In his next two volumes of poetry, The Tale of Sunlight and Where Sparrows Work Hard, Soto seems to have exorcised his demons because he tempers his social commentary on the poverty his family endured and instead focuses on the human suffering poverty causes. The street motif still exists in these works, but it is used to show that mobility is possible. Creatively, 1985 proved to be a very important year for Soto: He published his fourth volume of poetry, Black Hair, in which he fondly remembers his family and friends. He also attempted a new genre, autobiographical prose, when his Living up the Street: Narrative Recollections was published and earned for him an American Book Award. In this memoir and the one that immediately followed it, Small Faces, Soto vividly re-creates the racially mixed, laboring-class neighborhood in which he was raised, the struggles his family endured to provide the children with a safe environment, and the central dilemma of a life continually lived on the margins as a product of two cultures.

After writing poems and autobiographical memoirs, Soto ventured into children's literature with the publication of Baseball in April, and Other Stories. It immediately earned critical recognition, including the Best Book For Young Adults award from the American Library Association. The eleven short stories focus on Mexican American boys and girls and their fears, aspirations, angst, and desires as they enter adolescence. In this collection and his other fiction for children, Jesse, Taking Sides, and Pacific Crossing, Soto depicts real-life situations. Even though his writings are set in ethnic neighborhoods, the conflicts and situations in which he places his characters are universal. To depict these situations, he uses a quiet, often humorous and empathetic tone.

Soto's consistent attention to his craft has earned him the respect of critics and readers. His numerous awards and fellowships, among which include the Guggenheim Fellowship and being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, attest to his literary genius and his versatility. Gary Soto is a gifted writer who transcends the particular he knew and re-creates a universalized world that touches all of his readers.

Sharon K. Wilson

Learn More
Erben, Rudolf, and Ute Erben. "Popular Culture, Mass Media, and Chicano Identity in Gary Soto's Living up the Street and Small Faces." MELUS 17, no. 3 (Fall, 1991/1992): 43-52. The authors explore the conflict of dual consciousness and social problems that Soto examines.

Ganz, Robin. "Gary Soto." In Updating the Literary West, sponsored the Western Literature Association. Ft. Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1997. This collection of essays about writers with a connection to the Western United States includes this discussion of Soto's treatment of the Mexican American experience in his poetry and prose.

Manson, Michael Tomasek. "Poetry and Masculinity on the Anglo/Chicano Border: Gary Soto, Robert Frost, and Robert Haas." In The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era, edited by Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. Examines Soto's treatment of cross-cultural values and masculinity and their relationship to Puritanism and Calvinism in Home Course in Religion. Compares the treatment of these subjects in Soto's poetry with the handling of these subjects in the poems of Frost and Haas.

Olivares, Julian. "The Streets of Gary Soto." Latin America Literary Review 18, no. 35 (January-June, 1990): 32-49. Olivares explores Soto's ability to universalize the situations his characters face.

Soto, Gary. "Gary Soto." http://www.garysoto.com/. Accessed March 22, 2005. The author's website has a list of his books, information on his recent accomplishments, and answers to frequently asked questions.