Family Histories

Rain of Gold - Victor Villaseñor
Houston: Arte Publico, 1991

A friend, recommending this to me, describes it as the book that made him want to be a history major. (For me, that was pretty much a foregone conclusion - probably because of this book from my childhood that no one else has ever heard of - but I had a similar experience reading this.) Much as I love history, these kinds of books are few and far between, so I decided I would go find Rain of Gold after my semester ended.

And then I found out it was 550 pages long. And I questioned my resolve. There's a lot I want to read coming up; was I sure I wanted to devote so much time to this book about a Mexican family that eventually settles in California? But then I sped through the book. I could barely put it down. Victor Villaseñor's parents are the two protagonists in this unlikely love story, though the lifeblood of the story likely belongs to his grandmothers, two women who battle to keep their families alive and together through upheaval and violent change. The foreword, just over 2 pages long, is important, so don't skip it. Here he explains how these stories were part of the air he breathed growing up, and how he brushed them aside as he got older, as we all do, until he had a family of his own and realized "how empty I'd feel if I couldn't tell my own children about our ancestral roots." But even more importantly, he explains why the narrative is told in a melodramatic style that is sometimes reminiscent of magical realism. It makes sense then.

What works even as everything threatens Juan Salvador and Lupe and their families again and again is that you know the end - you know that eventually there will be Victor, and then this book. And as a result, history seems fated, preordained.

And finally, while the scenes is Mexico when Lupe is a little girl are perhaps the most vivid of the entire book, I was particularly interested in life after the two families make it to Southern California sometime in the early 1920s. My family first settled in Los Angeles around 1950, so learning more about what it was like - for Californians of all races - during the Prohibition era was fascinating.