Annotations for People: Ramos-manuel

This year there's been an unprecedented interest on the part of East coast publishers in Latino themes and literature. St. Martin's Press, for instance, has come out with its first Chicano mystery novel, The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz by Manuel Ramos. The novel follows this story of a middle-aged Chicano lawyer unraveling the mystery of an old homeboy's death in the sixties. Juan Felipe Herrera has our review.

It is late night Denver. We have the booze thirst for one more soul search in a city packed with blue blood prosecutors and urban developers. We are after love too. In the brown buffoon stance of middle-aged Luis Montez, we follow the drowsy meditations of this ex legal age Chicano lawyer, an accidentally trip into an old homeboy's death, Rocky Ruiz. In the sparse language and short jabs of 21 chapters, we listened to Montez decipher Rocky's last days in Denver's Aztlan, the mythical land and moment of Chicano's 60s unity. Montez doesn't look back willingly. He seeks this home base by accident. In broken desks and hidden journals, he uncovers the old student walkout days, Chicano Power chance, and Red Beret rallies. Montez is more interested in finding his own life center at Lawley's Taco Shack over beans and bourbon, slouch and sport bars, or in his collapsing legal practice, he half digests the city machine.

He doles over his divorce, his abandoned kids, and Jesus, his fading father. Montez feels the grip of hooded men and the heat of racial slurs as he plays back Rocky's killing. Yet all Montez can do is whimper. He spills nostalgia and spits barrio desolation until he traces the sudden death of another companero, Tino Pacheco. Tino's death leads him to Rocky's last night and breaks open the trap door to Los Guerrilleros, a tight-knit Chicano homeboy crew of the 60s led by Rocky Ruiz. Finding Rocky requires fumbling through romance, sex, and the voices of wives and stark eye Chicanas. Montez meets Teresa Fuentes, a Chicana with multiple names and guises. By day, the only minority lawyer working for an upscale firm. By night, a silvery persona with a secret assignment in Denver that will unravel the mystery around Rocky's death. Montez is condemned to seek who killed Rocky Ruiz. Why is the crew of the old Movimiento Gang being quickly taken out in cold blood?

Montez finds the answers in shreds. The truer keys come from the private knowledge and power that Teresa and her mother, Margarita, possess. Although the figure of Rocky Ruiz at times appears utopian and forced, this is outweighed by the complex development of Teresa's and Margarita's voice. Manuel Ramos writes a ballad where we must discover the hero and the heroine, where we must rise through a post-modern turf of laws, cultural rupture, and reassess the meanings of a bygone social movement that only comes to us in memory fevers in two-fisted blows against the 21st century in the elegance of versions of women in male-centered networks. Who is this lawyer dude Montez? Maybe it is not Rocky. We are after. Maybe we are looking for the 90s hombre, alone now. No longer surrounded by his homeboy vatos. No longer insulated by his self-made narratives for justice and revolucion. Ramos asks us, "Who will search for him? Who and where is he now?"

Juan Felipe Herrera is a writer and professor in the Chicano and Latin American studies department at California State University in Fresno.

This poem was written for Elizabeth Ramos, who upon discovering that she was HIV positive, became very active in the fight against aids and who died November 6th, 1988. Death by Association for Elizabeth Ramos.

[Background--music--symphony] I never knew her when she was healthy, when she could run or walk in the sun or rain. I never knew her when she was able and willing to play with her children, feed them or cloth them. In fact, I never really knew her, never met her or even talked to her. But I heard her once in an interview and cheered her at a rally, listened to her dreams that she so clearly stated, "I want to buy a house. I want to go to Disney World and always in between the words I want to live and see my children grow." A long time ago, unbeknownst to her, she came across death by association and her world was never the same again. In the end, thanks to her, we come across life by association and in the end, our world will never be the same either.

Marta Valentin is a poet, musician, and radio producer living in Boston.