Crossing Vines

Chicana & Chicano Visions of the Américas

by Rigoberto González

In the grim reality of Southern California’s grape fields, even the sun is a dark spot. For the migrant grape pickers in Crossing Vines, Rigoberto González’s novel that spans a single workday, the sun is a constant, malevolent force. The characters endure back-breaking, monotonous work as they succumb to the whims of their corrupt bosses. Each minute the sun rises higher in the sky is an eternity.

The textures, smells, sights, and emotions of their daily existences engulf the lives of the Mexican laborers. Scarce drinking water, sweltering heat, splintered fingers, contempt for the job, and violence toward one another compose their unflinchingly dark world. In González’s brutally honest story, the characters are compelled forward mercilessly by the rising crisis that envelops their interconnected stories. This uncompromisingly thought-provoking tale gives names and faces to the anonymous agricultural laborers, whose lives are like the tangled vines of the fruits of their labor.

Not since Tomás Rivera’s . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him has a novel converged on the lives of migrant workers so profoundly. Like Rivera, González employs nostalgia for Mexican tradition as he looks at the family feuds, economic injustices, and racism prevalent in the migrant worker experience.

Genres: Fiction

228 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2003

Reviews

[Madeline · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a hard time with this one. I think the issue stems from the fact that this book is so short, yet tries to cover a wide range of characters - the story takes place over the course of a single day, and the omnipresent narration takes us into the minds of a wide variety of Mexican laborers working the grape harvest in southern California. Chapters are brief and skip from one character to another before I really had time to get acclimated to their perspective, which meant I had a really hard time remembering who everyone was. It felt like the book should have either been longer, or narrowed its scope a little more.

[Cesar Erhard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was intrigued by the way exploitation transforms the existence of migrant farmworker’s lives into non existence, into apocalyptic spheres of isolation wherein time, memory, and momentum are consumed by the ever persistent hunger of the Sun and monotonous, backbreaking, work. Each chapter begins with a title and a subheading indicating a character and time. This relevant information positions the reader in the world of the inescapable, lugubrious, and potentially fatal work day. It is a day which lasts the entirety of the novel, and envelopes years worth of memories and emotions. González purposefully fills his narration with a plethora of characters and personalities, to the point that it becomes labor intensive as a reader just to remember their names and goals. The motive I believe is clear, for González wants his readers to feel the weight, the pressure, of the heat and dust and desperation, the precarity, involved in the work migrant farmworkers are tasked with doing.

[Olivia Hebner · Rating 3 out of 5]

a lot of things to talk about

[Charles Barragan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent novel about a day in the life of farm workers - covers a breadth of personalities and situations that seem all too real.

[Gail · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars