Crossing Vines

By Rigoberto González

Book Overview

In the grim reality of Southern California's grape fields, even the sun is a dark spot. For the migrant grape pickers in Crossing Vines, Rigoberto Gonz lez's novel that spans a single workday, the sun is a constant, malevolent force. The characters endure back-breaking, monotonous work as they succumb to the whims of their corrupt bosses. Each minute the sun rises higher in the sky is an eternity.

The textures, smells, sights, and emotions of their daily existences engulf the lives of the Mexican laborers. Scarce drinking water, sweltering heat, splintered fingers, contempt for the job, and violence toward one another compose their unflinchingly dark world. In Gonz lez's brutally honest story, the characters are compelled forward mercilessly by the rising crisis that envelops their interconnected stories. This uncompromisingly thought-provoking tale gives names and faces to the anonymous agricultural laborers, whose lives are like the tangled vines of the fruits of their labor.

Not since Tom s Rivera's . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him has a novel converged on the lives of migrant workers so profoundly. Like Rivera, Gonz lez employs nostalgia for Mexican tradition as he looks at the family feuds, economic injustices, and racism prevalent in the migrant worker experience.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080613528X
• ISBN13: 9780806135281
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A Poetic, Powerful First Novel

If you were unfamiliar with Rigoberto Gonzalez, it wouldn't take many pages of reading his first novel, "Crossing Vines," to suspect that his prior book was one of poetry, not prose. Each sentence, every paragraph, all chapters possess the clarity and music of poetry even in recounting the often harsh and always difficult lives of a crew of grape pickers. In a series of vignettes focusing on different characters, Gonzalez allows us into the lives and painful pasts of these workers. Gonzalez avoids the melodramatic and cliche when it would be easy to fall into such traps. This is a poetic, powerful first novel.