752 The American Century: Literature since 19451920s, Rivera worked as a migrant farm laborer in the 1950s; and this experience,
together with his working-class background, formed the basis of his writing.
“In Tierra I wrote about the migrant worker in a ten year period,” Rivera explained
in an interview. “I began to see that my role would be to document that period of
time, but giving it some kind of spiritual strength or spiritual history.” As Rivera
intimates here, Tierra has profound social concerns, but it is not a work of social
realism. Instead, in covering the ten years from 1945 to 1955, it offers a complex
narrative of subjective impressions. Concentrating on the lives and wanderings of
Mexican workers, and with the Korean War serving as an immediate backdrop,
Tierra eschews chronological presentation and linear plot development. What it has
instead is a structure reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time. Two vignettes
frame the book. Within that frame are twelve brief stories or estempas common to
Spanish and Latin American fiction, interspersed with thirteen sketches. The links
between these different elements are tonal and thematic, as Rivera reveals a dawning
sense of communal solidarity among the Mexican migrants. A central character –
an unnamed boy – appears in many, but no means all, of the sections. On one level,
Tierra narrates an allegorical year in the life of this anonymous young farmworker;
and, on this level, what the reader witnesses is the growth of a consciousness.
The host of migrant workers caught in the flow of their feelings and thoughts
gradually register their ability to sustain their own imagined community. As they do
so, and in a related movement, the central narrative persona constructs an identity
for himself that enables him to mediate between his Mexican past and neocolonial
present. He also recognizes that this identity depends on identification with the
people, the wretched of the earth who share his condition of wandering, perpetual
arrivals and departures.
So, in its thematic inclination, Tierra is very different from In Our Time. The
central character realizes himself with rather than without his people. Like the equally
anonymous protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, it is his task to forge the
uncreated conscience of his race. At the end of the book, he has even retreated as the
invisible man does, although “under the house” rather than underground, to ponder
his individual and communal destiny – and to weave a usable past out of the web of
family lore and Mexican-American history that is his inheritance. The fragmentary
nature of Tierra may serve as a reflection of the fragmented nature of the migrant
life. But it also suggests the fragments out of which the consciousness in the book
must and does construct a viable culture. Anglo-American society receives fierce
analysis, but the indigenous culture of Mexican-Americans is not immune from
criticism. The title of the book, after all, refers to an occasion when the young
protagonist curses God and expects the earth to devour him in punishment; it does
not, and so he begins to question the religion of his mother and his community.
Tierra is a novel that does not work in the easy, polarized terms of assimilation or
resistance. Instead, it explores and enunciates the complex, richly layered character
of Mexican-American identity, as the nameless narrator, the anonymous bearer of
his race, becomes a spiritual voyager – open to constant transformation as the old
struggles with the new.GGray_c05.indd 752ray_c 05 .indd 752 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM