88 pages • 2 hours read
Tomás RiveraAnd The Earth Did Not Devour Him
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Power of Storytelling
And the Earth Did Not Devour Him presents a portrait of a community that has been marginalized. By telling the migrant workers’ stories, through his experience within the community, the narrator pulls them away from the margins and into the center of American experience. They are no longer a voiceless and stereotyped collective at the fringes but complex and fully realized individuals who interact with and experience a full range of human emotions. Vignette 13 most explicitly illustrates this through the poet Bartolo who, like the book’s narrator, gives voice to the migrant workers’ experiences. In Bartolo’s case, “voice” is literal: He urges residents to read his poems aloud. However, his statement that the “spoken word” is “the seed of love in the darkness” can be understood more generally as expressing the importance of being seen and heard (138). Sharing the migrants’ experiences disrupts easy but false generalizations and stereotyping, whether romanticized or demonized. Some of the characters are loving people who become victims of their circumstances, like Don Efraín, and Doña Chona. Some vigorously resist their exploitation, like Don Mateo. Some are sinister, like Don Laíto and Doña Bone. Some are conflicted, like Juanita, and some cannot transcend their despair, like Ramón. Though they share a common condition, they are each unique and whole.
On a metaphoric level, the book also fulfills the spoken word’s purpose to provide a “seed of love in the darkness” by telling stories that ensure the migrant workers are seen and heard (138). Through the book, the narrator has done what Bartolo did, but with stories and vignettes instead of poems: The boy has crafted stories that illuminate the lives of Mexican migrant workers in South Texas. Telling their stories in this way becomes an act of love for those in his community. He honors their dreams, sacrifices, tragedies, and losses, in the process coming to understand himself, his values, and his community, if not completely, then with greater affection and appreciation.
The Interdependence of Paradoxical Elements: Hope/Despair, Good/Bad, Light/Dark
Throughout the book, characters vacillate between contrasting elements. The stream-of-consciousness narrative style allows these elements to coexist without forcing reconciliation among contrasting events, experiences, and feelings. In the case of hope and despair, the workers experience discrimination, hardships, and losses that can seem inescapable yet continue to hope for better jobs and opportunities, and believinge education may be a route to these. The tension between hope and despair is threaded through the various motifs, in particular education, race/ethnicity, and skepticism. For example, the narrator experiences skepticism specifically in relation to religious beliefs, but skepticism is also expressed in relation to the possibility for advancement and the usefulness of education. This is demonstrated in Vvignette four4. One speaker asks the other why they “go to school so much” (88). In response to the second speaker saying they go to school to prepare for opportunities, the first speaker replies, “If I were you I wouldn’t worry about that. […] We can’t get worst off than we already are. That’s why I don’t worry” (88). Further, in Vvignette six6, a Protestant minister promises to send a man to teach the farm workers manual skills, but it comes to nothing as the man holes up inside a trailer with the minister’s wife and ignores the workers. In Cchapter 9, Don Efraín teaches his three children how to box in the hope that one of them may grow up to become a high-paid boxer. While mimicking a boxing match as their father taught them, two of his children catch fire and die. The game that was meant to prepare them for future opportunities becomes the cause of their deaths.
The boy contrasts and conflates good and bad in the figures of Don Laíto and Doña Bone and Juanita and Ramón. Though Don Laíto and Doña Bone are bootleggers, thieves, and murderers, the boy insists they are “good people” (90). They show him some kindness at the beginning of his stay, and when they cannot sell the items they steal, they give them away. He acknowledges that they have a dark side, but he does not define them only by their bad acts. In a related way, he shows how Juanita’s desire for more experiences and Ramón’s possessiveness poisons their love for each other. Yet neighborhood residents who knew them both insist the two loved each other deeply. Their love is neither defined nor negated by its tragic end.
The narrative also contrasts and conflates the effects of light and darkness. In Cchapter 13, the truck carrying the workers up north for work breaks down in early dawn. As the sun gradually illuminates the sky, “people were becoming people” (137). In the dark, the individuals may appear as an indistinguishable mass, but light reveals their humanity. This function of light and dark connects with the purpose of the poems discussed in the vignette at the end of Cchapter 13. Bartolo refers to them as “the seed of love in the darkness” (138). Using “love” as opposed to “light” disrupts the reader’s expectation for what makes darkness bearable. It is not the fact of darkness itself that is negative, as becomes evident in Cchapter 14, when the boy lies under the house “in the dark” thinking (143). The darkness does not scare the boy or make him uncomfortable. Rather, he finds it to be conducive to reflection on and reconstruction of his memories.
