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Ron Arias

Ronald Francis Arias (born November 30, 1941) is an American former senior writer and correspondent for People magazine and People en Español. He is also a highly regarded author whose novel The Road to Tamazunchale has been recognized as a milestone in Mexican-American literature.[2]

About Arias' fiction anthology, The Wetback and Other Stories (2016), author Paul Theroux writes, "I felt reading these wonderful stories that I was admitted to an adjacent neighborhood, a rich culture that is another world—call it Amexica—both mysterious and magical, that is persuasive through its tenderness. My hope is that Ron Arias continues to write short stories that tell us who we are."[3][4]

Early life

A Los Angeles native, Arias spent his early years in a neighborhood located between the Los Angeles River and Elysian Park known as Frog Town or Elysian Valley, the allegorical setting for much of his fictional work.[5]

Career

Journalism

Arias' journalism career began in 1962 in Argentina working for the English-language daily newspaper, Buenos Aires Herald. Later, he became a Peace Corps volunteer near Cusco, Peru, contributing to the Christian Science Monitor an eyewitness account of a massacre of farmers by government troops. He also worked for a year on the Daily Journal in Caracas, Venezuela, thereafter publishing as a freelancer to various publications, including The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Hispanic Link, and Nuestro magazine.[6]

In 1985 Arias began work as a People magazine senior writer with a global beat. His feature byline stories focused on all manner of people in war, famine, hurricanes, earthquakes and other calamities.[7]

Of his time as the magazine's parachute journalist, Arias has said, "On every continent, I covered five wars, famine, earthquakes, hurricanes, all kinds of disasters in Haiti, Somalia, Ethiopia, Australia, Vietnam, Moscow, you name it." His first major disaster article was the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which he was assigned simply because he was the only staff member fluent in Spanish.[8]

Literary work

Arias' work is influenced by twentieth-century Latin American literature[9] and he has been called "a post-modernist who integrates in his fiction a keen eye for actual Mexican-American experience."[10]

The Road to Tamazunchale

Arias' best known work is the novel The Road to Tamazunchale, for which numerous critical studies exist. The Road to Tamazunchale depicts the last days of Fausto Tejada, an old widower being cared for by his teenage niece in Los Angeles and occasionally visited by the spirit of his dead wife. Fausto spends his final days in a number of fantastic scenarios that suggest magic realism.[citation needed]

Tamazunchale, while a real place, serves here as a metaphorical place, a magical place where wishes come true but that can never really be reached; the real town is never shown in the novel, but is used in the fantastical play that Fausto and his neighbors create called "The Road to Tamazunchale". The novel radically breaks with the tradition of Chicano literature that focuses on learning to understand reality, constructing a Chicano version of history and bringing order to the world. Instead, Arias' protagonist is more a creator of worlds than an interpreter of them.[11]

Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide's entry for Arias describes The Road to Tamazunchale as a breakthrough work of Chicano fiction:

It may be that future historians of American literature will look back on The Road to Tamazunchale as critics now look at Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: as the foundation piece by which Joyce emerges from the matrix of his marginal, minority culture to transform its localism into enduring and lucid literary symbols relevant to the universal human experience.[5]

A feature film adaptation of The Road to Tamazunchale entitled Fausto's Road is in the works.[12]

According to Arias himself, The Wetback and Other Stories, a collection of short stories inspired by the Mexican-American denizens of the Elysian Valley of his youth, is an attempt to "bridge the white world and the darker Spanish-speaking world":

They are right next door, they are in our backyards, they take care of our kids, they wash our dishes... who are these people? This is who they are. It's a literary treatment or peek at that but... I want to humanize Mexicans or people from my kind of background, not just Mexicans, but all Latin Americans because I do have their perspective.[13]

Gardens of Plenty

In 2024, Arias published Gardens of Plenty, his historical novel about the adventures of Joseph Fields, a teenage orphan who flees the squalor of 16th-century London aboard a British slave ship and finds himself shipwrecked in colonial Mexico.[14]

Personal life

While a student at UCLA, Arias met and quickly married his wife Joan, then working towards her doctorate in Hispanic languages and literature.[15] Their only son is filmmaker Michael Arias, currently residing in Tokyo, Japan.[16]

Arias is an accomplished potter (retiring from People having ignited a previously dormant passion for the fine arts).[17][18]

Awards and honors

List of works

Fiction

Non-fiction

Notable articles

Bilbiographical Resources

https://faculty.ucmerced.edu/mmartin-rodriguez/index_files/vhAriasRon.htm

See also

References

  1. ^ "Obituary: Joan M. Arias". claremont-courier.com. Claremon Courier. December 20, 2017. Retrieved February 23, 2024.
  2. ^ Martínez, Eliud (1987). "Ron Arias' The Road to Tamazunchale: Cultural Inheritance and Literary Expression". The Road To Tamazunchale. By Arias, Ron. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press. ISBN 9780916950705. The Road to Tamazunchale, then is a carefully crafted work which exhibits and places in the service of Chicano literature a large number of artistic resources. For this reason it has been a pacesetter and it marks a new direction for Chicano literature.
  3. ^ "The Wetback and Other Stories by Ron Arias (Peru)". peacecorpsworldwide.org. Peace Corps Worldwide. July 15, 2015. Retrieved October 16, 2016.
  4. ^ "Hispanic Truths: Ron Arias in conversation with Juan Delgado". IECN. August 15, 2018.
  5. ^ a b Gingerich, Willard (July 24, 1985). "Ron Arias". In Martinez, Julio A.; Lomeli, Francisco A. (eds.). Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0313236914.
  6. ^ Bruce-Novoa, Juan (1980). Chicano Authors: Inquiry By Interview. University of Texas Press.
  7. ^ Kessler, Judy (1994). Inside People: The Stories Behind the Stories. Villard Books.
  8. ^ Harmon, Joanie (October 11, 2007). "Ron Arias: Journalist Teaches Students to Tell Their Stories". csudhnews.com. California State University, Dominguez Hills. Retrieved October 16, 2016.
  9. ^ Latino Fiction Literature Analysis Chapter 2 Part 1, latinostories.com; accessed June 3, 2017.
  10. ^ DLB entry, BookRags.com; accessed June 3, 2017.
  11. ^ Luis Leal and Manuel M. Martin-Rodríguez, "Chicano Literature", The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (eds Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker), pg. 573.
  12. ^ "Fausto's Road". IMDbPro. February 16, 2015. Retrieved October 18, 2016.
  13. ^ Hixon, Michael (November 7, 2016). "Hermosa Beach writer explores Los Angeles roots in short stories". The Beach Reporter. The Beach Reporter. Retrieved November 24, 2016.
  14. ^ "Kirkus Reviews Gardens of Plenty". Kirkus Reviews. Kirkus Media LLC. June 12, 2024. Retrieved July 15, 2024.
  15. ^ Gross, Lynne S. (June 24, 2014). "Hermosa Beach volunteer breaks it down". The Beach Reporter. The Beach Reporter. Retrieved October 16, 2016.
  16. ^ "Ron Arias profile". Red Bird Chapbooks. Red Bird Chapbooks. Retrieved October 16, 2016.
  17. ^ "Writer finds new life in his hands - Potter Ron Arias". Easy Reader News. Easy Reader News. November 8, 2012. Retrieved October 16, 2016.
  18. ^ Dawson, Kelly. "Wheel House". South Bay Magazine. Moon Tide Media. Retrieved October 16, 2016.
  19. ^ a b Leonard Metz (November 7, 1975). "Professor at Craft Hills nominated for book award". The San Bernardino County Sun. p. 29. Retrieved 2016-10-13.
  20. ^ "100 YEARS OF LATINO LITERATURE". latinopia.com. March 6, 2010. Retrieved October 13, 2016. ... 1975 At the University of California at Irvine, writer Alejandro Morales and his colleagues at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese institute the Chicano Literary Prize. The first, second and third prize winner are Ron Arias for The Wetback ...
  21. ^ a b "Bilingual Review/Press books receive awards" (PDF). News You Need To Know. Arizona State University Public Relations. April 2004. Retrieved October 13, 2016.
  22. ^ "Awards Winners Announced". Los Angeles Press Club. Los Angeles Press Club. June 30, 2004. Retrieved October 13, 2016.
  23. ^ "Long-Time Journalist's Story Collection Wins 2016 Peace Corps Award!". Arte Público Press. Arte Público Press. August 23, 2017. Retrieved October 2, 2017.

Further reading

External links