And The Earth Did Not Devour Him

And the Earth Did Not Devour Him can be understood as a portrait of the Mexican migrant community. Through the lens of a young boy who remains nameless throughout the book, this portrait attempts to capture the community’s struggles, triumphs, traditions, beliefs, and values. Not giving the narrator a name shifts some of the focus off of him and onto the people whose lives he portrays. This lends symbolic value to the literal portrait created in Cchapter 12. Don Mateo commissions a portrait of his son, Chuy, who has died in the Korean War. The artist promises Don Mateo that Chuy can be pictured wearing his uniform, though he is not wearing it in the original photo on which the artist will base the portrait. The portrait, then, will not be factually faithful but faithful to how his parents (and, through them, the artist) remember him. Don Mateo and his wife have only one photo, which is destroyed in the artist’s scam. When Don Mateo hunts the artist down and compels him to create the portrait, it is entirely from memory. A friend of Don Mateo’s admits that he does not remember what Chuy looked like, but everyone says Chuy was a “chip off the old block” (131). Similarly, it is implied the portrait the boy crafts of his “lost” year is faithful to his experiences and memories rather than being factually accurate. Like the portrait, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him is a product of the boy’s most visceral memories.

And the Earth Did Not Devour Him is told in a “stream-of consciousness” narrative style. The term originated in the field of psychology in the late 19th nineteenth century as a way to capture people’s organic thought processes. Literary critics later adopted the term in the early 20th twentieth century (in relation to modernist novels such as Ulysses by James Joyce) to describe novels that are free-flowing and attempt to replicate how people think. And the Earth Did Not Devour Him demonstrates this style through its use of dialogue that does not name the speakers, fused sentences and sentence fragments, seemingly random details, fragmented thoughts presented out of chronological order, and a tendency to allude to events rather than state them. All of these techniques represent the nature of thought. It is not necessarily tidy and organized but can be spontaneous and disorganized.

Stream-of-consciousness is also a significant storytelling approach for this book because it replicates the confused, disordered, and dreamlike state of the narrator’s memories ,as he describes them in the first chapter. He is not sure what he remembers and may not have fully understood everything he heard. The stream-of-consciousness narrative approach replicates his uncertainty at the language level.

The narrator and other characters in his story are repeatedly discriminated against or victimized because of their race/ethnicity. The boss in Cchapter two 2 withholds water from the workers despite the heat and attempts to catch them drinking when they should be working in order to prevent paying them for their labor. Though the child he shot dies, the man is not found guilty of the crime, an implicit commentary on racial/ethnic discrimination in the justice system. In Cchapter four4, the white boy the narrator gets into a fight with at school says he does not like Mexicans because they steal. The white boy throws the first punch, yet it is the narrator who is expelled. The janitor refers to him as the “Mexican kid” while the white boys are “our boys,” illustrating how Mexican children are treated as outsiders and marginalized (85). Also in Cchapter four4, the boy reflects on the shame he feels when a teacher puts him in the corner for not knowing how to read. Vignette 12 features a man called Figueroa, who is imprisoned, possibly because he was turned in by someone with a racial motive: Figueroa returned to Texas with a white girl from Wisconsin.