No comments about Francisco Vasquez De Coronado: The Search for Cities of Gold (Proud Heritage-the Hispanic Library).

No comments about Frida Kahlo: Painting Her Life (Famous Latinos).

No comments about Rigoberta Menchu Indian Rights Activist (The 20th Century's Most Influential: Hispanics).

No comments about Home As Creation: The Influence of Early Childhood Experience in the Literary Creation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Agustin Yanez and Juan Rolfo (American ... Series Xxii, Latin American Literature).

No comments about Cesar Chavez (Twentieth Century's Most Influential Hispanics).

No comments about Mexican American Biographies: A Historical Dictionary, 1836-1987.

No comments about Cesar Chavez: Crusader for Social Change (Signature Lives: Modern America series) (Signature Lives).

1 comments about The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams.

1. THE SPANISH AMERICAN ROOTS has me wondering why it isn't more satisfying and persuasive, since its author, Julio Marzan, has wonderful excitement and knows his Williams like the back of his hand, always pulling out the exact right referent with which to back his argumentation. Every page has another fine quotation and an equally fine application, and one couldn't be more sympathetic to the author's cause, which makes perfect sense the more one thinks about it.
   
   Yet how does Williams' Spanish heritage manifest itself in his poetry? There Marzan has an uphill struggle on his hands. Emotionally it makes sense, since a lot of WCW's writing seems to operate on a double matrix, there's an Anglo rectitude Marzan identifies with WCW's father, "William George," and there's an extra element, something the skews the poetry into a previously unknown (in American poetry) range of modernism and Marzan pins this as the Puerto Rican strain, for Williams' mother was born and reared in Mayaguez. What makes it difficult for Marzan is that Williams only rarely acknowledges anything Spanish and when he does, it's almost always with that distant reach of the "other." "Those people." Himself as a "Gringo." It's hard to follow all of Marzan's arguments, mainly because one doesn't always want to go where he wants to go, i.e., tracking down all references to the "jungle" or the "fertile" or the "dark side" (the duende) in Williams' work and invariably he sees all these strains as the Spanish at work in WCW and it all starts to seem, if not reductive, then a bit retardataire, like saying Rita Hayworth was an appealing dancer because she was Mexican. In fact all the worst aspects of Williams, especially his sexual politics, become Puerto Rican in Marzan's reading and I don't know if he realizes how compromised his Latin American WCW becomes. No, I'm wrong there; he does appreciate how much his reading complicates our previously beneficent image of Williams, but again, the evidence is scant enough to make you think, maybe, maybe not.
   
   He says this is not a biography but rather a book that will aid the biographer of the future. May that writer come along who can shed light on Marzan's tantalizing hints. He's got the sizzle, but where's the steak?

No comments about Romance del Siglo, El.

No comments about Roberto Clemente: Baseball Hero (Famous Latinos).