From Publishers Weekly
Politically savvy, sociologically on the mark, witty and tragic by turns, this multiethnic novel chronicles a week in the life of a Chicano/Indian/Coyote Robin Hood. "El Indio Jes#s," as the man is called, cruises his unnamed border town in his caro troquita, a VW Beetle he turns into a pick-up truck, hiring himself out to do repair work and organizing his fellow drifters, mostly undocumented immigrants. As he crisscrosses the district, he meets up with a succession of people whose stories make up the bulk of the novel. El Chuy Jim?nez, a builder with an amazing creative streak, is seduced from El Indio's fly-by-night construction business, the Right On Time Company, by a beautiful blonde who symbolizes the corrupting attractions of the Caucasian, or gabacho, world. Another of El Indio's friends, Miguel Olson, is burned to death in a car outside a bar, leading El Indio to muse on the life of the "Chicano Swede," as Olson was known. The longest episode involves El Indio's daring plan to ferry a young muralist and his grandmother into the U.S., with the help of an Anglo priest. The book is rife with expos?s of the bureaucratic catch-22s that beset the poor, as when a rent receipt is required to get food stamps. But the slumlords are renting property already sold to the urban renewal program and are unable to provide legal rent receipts. El Indio Jes#s is a maverick genius who can circumvent almost every aspect of such byzantine systems. Unfortunately, he seems unable to keep from being arrested for lacking the proper automobile papers. Though Ballejos and Witt speechify in places, they otherwise offer up a stinging, eloquent critique of a hypocritical world determined to beat down those who fail to buy into the system.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Less than a novel per se, this work is more a series of loosely connected episodes tied together by the presence (direct or indirect) of the eponymous hero, who moves in and out of the lives of his Chicano acquaintances like a ubiquitous spirit. The work focuses on a typical week in Jes#s's life, with each self-contained episode featuring no more than a perfunctory central intrigue. These vignettes offer typical Chicano scenarios in the American Southwest; we are shown in great detail changes in the lives of the characters but don't get to know them as real people. Any attempts to cultivate multicultural awareness backfire, since the stereotypes of both Anglos and Chicanos are equally derisive. Equally distracting is the authors' desultory sermonizing on politics and social issues to the extent that the narration seems to be the vehicle for the proselytizing rather than the other way around. Recommended only for Chicano collections.DLawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
