Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News March 21, 2014
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| Rolondo Hinojosa-Smith. Photo by Joe O'Connell |
AUSTIN — Rolando Hinojosa-Smith chose to set his fictionalized Texas-Mexico border world in Klail City because there is no k in the Spanish language.
“It shows the Anglo side — the people who have taken over the land,” he said.
The first volume of the “Klail City Death Trip” series appeared in the '70s. Hinojosa-Smith is now at work on the 16th and what he expects to be the final series book. The novels and their world recently garnered him the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
“I was speechless,” he said of the call informing him of the award.
In late April, Houston's Arte Público Press will republish — in a never-available bilingual edition — his classic early '70s novel “The Valley/Estampas del valle,” the first in the Klail City cycle, which won a national Chicano literature award, Premio Quinto Sol, in 1972. Four years later, he won the highest award for the novel in Latin America, the Premio Casas de las Americas.
Hinojosa-Smith's work has been compared to William Faulkner's and the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. He humbly dismisses that, yet he often quotes Faulkner to his creative writing students at the University of Texas at Austin: “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
Born in 1929, Hinojosa-Smith wrote his first story — in Spanish — at 16 while spending a World War II summer with family in the small Mexican town Arteaga. The tale was about farm workers who come home and are pressed into military service. He lost the manuscript, then his mother found it and he lost it again, but it set a tone for what would come.
He is anonymous on the bus he rides to the University of Texas with book in hand and his mind often on the next story. By 7 a.m. each weekday he arrives at the same small office in UT's Parlin Hall he has occupied for more than 30 years. Colorful paper flowers decorate the wall — his daughter put them up two decades ago when she was an undergrad at the school.
Parlin Hall's bluish tile walls evoke its 1954 opening, which came after Hinojosa-Smith's own UT days as a member of the elite Tejas Club. He attended on the G.I. Bill after Army service spent largely in Puerto Rico as a military newspaper reporter and an Armed Forces Radio announcer called Rocky the Disc Jockey.
The UT campus was a big leap for a boy from Mercedes in the Rio Grande Valley, the model for Klail City, which resides in Belken County — meant as a stand-in for four border counties combined.
But his childhood home was filled with books. His Anglo mother was a teacher like her mother before her. His father had fought in the Mexican Revolution and loved to tell stories. The house was filled with a constant flow of Spanish and English. Four of the five children — Rolando was the baby — became teachers. His first creative works saw print in a high school publication called Creative Bits.
That mixed heritage imbues richness to the “Klail City Death Trap” series, which has Mexican-American and Anglo kids in conflict, and Mexican and Anglo politicians melding into one breed.
“There are fools on both sides of the fence,” he said.
Hinojosa-Smith figures he's got a few more years in the classroom, but he has no plans to stop writing. He used to write in longhand, with only his first novel composed in Spanish. These days he uses a computer, typing in English and later translating his own work to Spanish.
He travels home frequently and recently gave the convocation at his alma mater, Mercedes High School. He told students of how their town contributed to World War II, with 16 boys lost in the war and another 16 gone later from wounds they suffered.
It's the story of the Rio Grande Valley that has sustained him, fascinated him as a writer for decades.
“Sure, I'll keep writing,” he said. “I'd like to write something else than the series.”
His writing advice? “Don't fall in love with your writing. If it's good, you'll know.”
Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer.
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