Famous All Over Town
Wimsatt, Margaret
Wild ride, wild language FAMOUS ALL OVER TOWN Danny Santiago Simon and Schuster, $14.95, 285 pp. Margaret Wimsatt THE COUNTRY is full of problem kids, and ghettos and barrios produce many of...
...As usual, tough Father is the sucker, his son, the wise one...
...Chato's gang of friends and enemies, as well as policemen, juvenile workers, and relations on both sides of the border...
...That was an exciting summer on Shamrock Street, though maybe not anything out of the ordinary...
...It costed me nothing...
...The author's eyes and voice provide an insight into the sad funniness of life...
...All this is told in a complex language brew: murdered Spanish, murdered English, combine on the page to be intelligible, even eloquent...
...The picaresque plot cannot be summarized and need not be, except to mention its high point: the wild ride of the Medinas to Titatlan in southern Mexico, to visit Mammacita's relatives, and their return...
...Shamrock Street, East L. A., had been only a slum then, but now it has gone, vanished, asphalted over by the Southern Pacific Railroad for freight yards...
...Aged twenty-eight, ne looks back on the summer of his fourteenth birthday...
...Language as tool, as means to an end...
...The stolen-car ride that ends in the death of young Rudy's friend Pelon is funny almost all the way...
...Older sister Lena had been christened Tranquillina, but the first part of her name disappeared in babyhood...
...Seldom has the topic of juvenile delinquency been approached with such loving and knowledgeable irony...
...Ignorance of, and disdain for, Norte-Americano ways got Chato and his friends into scrapes with The Law...
...Problem kids, as we all know, come from problem families and backgrounds, and Rudy M. Medina, Jr., (Chato) tells the story of his...
...And there are father's compadres, mother's com-adres...
...Mam-macita is tiny, and was raised in southern Mexico...
...My fingers slided back and forth...
...she is one of the most endearing female urchins of all time, usefully defending her asthmatic, undersized young brother, growing up tough but good...
...This sense of the tragi-comic gives the novel its power...
...Margaret Wimsatt THE COUNTRY is full of problem kids, and ghettos and barrios produce many of them, as do Indian reservations...
...It is the setting for Danny Santiago's first novel...
...No quieras un free shoeshine...
...Rudy Sr., in the novel, is a would-be tough Mexican-American, generous and brutal by turns...
...But to be, as it has been described, illiterate in two languages, creates the problems Santiago's characters face...
...The macho attitudes, the heavy hands, of old Rudy and his compadres are funny because Mammacita and her comadres and her daughter by guile achieve their ends - after enduring blows...
...With music, it would make a fine scenario.a fine scenario...
...New York City might claim title as the most productive, but Los Angeles is certainly in the running...
...He never once discriminated me...
...It lost for the Shamrock Street residents their homes and their satisfactory way of life...
...Of course it also gave them a sense of community which while it lasted was feudal and chivalric - and funny, to the outsider, as Don Quixote's world has always been to its readers...
...Language is the eye of thought, and to be bilingual doubles the vision...
...Danny Santiago has written a love letter, in Chicano...
...Seldom if never...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 10
