Books in Review
Renato Rosaldo
The Chasers
Durham, North Carolina. Duke University
Press. 2019. 144 pages.
Renato Rosaldo established himself as an
ethno-poet with his groundbreaking 2013
volume The Day of Shelly’s Death, which
combined poetry, ethnography, and photo-
graphs to tell the moving story of his wife’s
fatal accident decades earlier in Philippine
backcountry. Now he gives us a new collec-
tion, also multidisciplinary. The Chasers is
a deep-reaching account, in prose poems,
of the high school gang to which the poet
belonged when he was a student at Tucson
High from 1956 to 1959.
An anthropologist as well as poet,
Rosaldo describes this new book as auto-
ethnography. Concept as well as language
innovation make it as soul-wrenching as
its predecessor. More club than gang, as the
term is used today, the Chasers were twelve
adolescent males searching for identity in a
racist and classist time. Eleven were Mexican
Americans, one Jewish, one from a family of
migrant workers. The Chasers had their own
jackets and immense pride. In a prelude,
Rosaldo writes: “What I learned through
participant-observation was not social
description. It was personal... what it meant
to be a Chaser, how it sustained us, how we
sustained us, how they sustained me.”
It was at their fiftieth high school reunion
that the eleven surviving Chasers (one was
deceased by then) reunited and “remem-
bered what we never forgot, what we heldclose, the people and places we never let go... once we resumed, we couldn’t stop gath-
ering, looking back, unforgetting.” Memory
is many-layered in these powerful poems.
The men continued to meet. The idea for
this book was born.
Who are these men today? The one
no longer alive was a supermarket pro-
duce manager. The others worked as a field
superintendent for a mechanical contractor,
a marijuana smuggler, a fireman and para-
medic, an artist and singer, two lawyers, an
elementary school principal, a psychiatrist,
a moving and storage estimator, a cultur-
al anthropologist, and a neurologist. Two
Anglo friends, also present in these pages,
were a realtor and university professor. A
woman close to the boys was a teacher and
owns a religious store. Most have risen in
life. All remain Chasers.
The Chasers is composed of brief prose
poems in the voices of these boys-become-
men. Their teenage identities sound through
words spoken decades later. Rosaldo’s eth-
nographic skill and poet’s intuition are evi-
dent in the portraits he creates. Photos of
each Chaser and their female ally add to the
book’s multilayered feeling.
RENATO ROSALDOwider audience than westerners or ecolo-
gists only.
The concerns for conservation raised
here are as diverse as their authors. Rancher
Yvonne Martinell’s “Ranching Communi-
ties and Conservation Must Be Combined”
is not so much an argument as a narrative,
which insists that her family and business
are part of this landscape, not separable
from it. Martinell describes, as an example
of ranchers’ commitment to conservation,
the extra expense she pays to protect her
herds from wildlife diseases. But Robert
B. Keitner notes that fears of brucillosis
are often used to restrict the movement
of Yellowstone’s bison, and the restrictions
put on that rare herd’s range pose a threat
to their species’ viability. Meanwhile, John
D. Varley finds wildness in Yellowstone at
an entirely different scale—a biologist and
field researcher with decades of experience,
he studies newly discovered microfauna at
the bottom of the park’s deep lakes.
Reimagining a Place for the Wild
deserves a place in the canon of American
ecological literature alongside the likes of
Muir, Leopold, and Carson. In fact, Bill
McKibben’s The End of Nature comes to
mind immediately for comparison. Thirty
years ago, McKibben lamented the end
of wild places. No place on earth was left
completely free of human influence; how-
ever, when contributor Jeremy Schmidt
describes a wild place he cherished in
childhood, his memory includes the “low,labored sound of a tractor working” in the
distance. For the writers in this collection,
their imagination of the wild includes its
people, too.
As Wendy Fisher notes in her contri-
bution, wild places in this century must
be managed if they are to survive. This
reimagined wild cannot be a place where
humanity has no presence. Instead, Rei-
magining a Place for the Wild inherits the
viewpoint of the poet Robinson Jeffers,
who wrote often about the invincibility of
nature. As Jeremy Schmidt writes in “Wait-
ing for Wolves,” “Wildness is everywhere.
It is part of us.... Wild creatures might
disappear. Wildness will not.”
Greg Brown
Mercyhurst University88 W LT SUMMER 2019