In the early 1950s Fresno, California, was an arid and grimy city of 91,000 inhabitants. Many were caught in an economic chokehold that relegated them to a lifetime of punishing labor in the cotton field, the orchard and vineyard or the small factory. African American, “Okie,” Chicano and Asian American families populated Fresno's blue-collar neighborhoods and by this time the racism of the thirties and forties had given way to a kind of mutual acceptance, born of the daily necessity of working together and by their shared “culture of poverty.” Every weekday residents of Fresno's barrios and other inner-city neighborhoods would pile aboard trucks and buses that transported them to the lush and fertile farmland of the San Joaquin Valley that surrounds the city.

Against this backdrop of agricultural plenty and urban indigence, Gary Soto was born on Fresno's Braly Street on April 12, 1952. Frank Soto, Gary's paternal grandfather, had emigrated from Mexico to Fresno as a young man to escape the economic and political instability of pre-revolution Mexico. It was in Fresno that he met his future wife Paolo who sold ice cream cones on the street to support herself and her child; she'd married as a teenager in Mexico and had her first baby there before emigrating to Fresno after the Mexican Revolution. Gary's grandparents met, fell in love, married and worked in the fields, as did their children. Manuel Soto, their third son, was a charming and intelligent boy with elegant good looks and glimmering brown eyes. He and Angie Trevino, Gary's mother, met in 1947 at Edison High School. Like so many other young men and women from Fresno's working class neighborhoods, neither Angie nor Manuel finished high school. They married at eighteen and soon began having children. Gary's older brother Rick was born on June 28, 1950, Gary's birth followed two years later, and his sister Debra was born on March 6, 1953.

One August day when Gary was five years old, Manuel Soto went to work at the construction site where he was then employed. A co-worker and family friend climbed a ladder with a tray of nails on his shoulder, lost his balance and fell on top of Manuel, breaking his neck. Gary's father died two days later; he was twenty-seven years old. In a narrative recollection entitled “This Man,” Soto speculates that their neighbor “must have felt guilt and shame” because he turned his back on the Sotos after the accident. Here Soto imagines what could have taken place five doors down the street:

[S]tarting off to the store, [he] thinks of Manuel, our father, maybe sees his face whole, maybe sees his face twisted and on the ground, the blood already drying. … But how much? How much of our father was on his mind? Did the kids in the street distract him, the neighbors on porches, a barking dog? Did he sing inside his head, worry about bills maybe think of work? … He bought his butter, went home to eat with his children, who after the accident never came over to play with us. … We lived poor years because our father died. We suffered quietly and hurt even today. Shouldn't this mean something to him? (Lesser Evils 82-83)

Within the Soto family an imperturbable silence and secrecy surrounded the dead father, compounding the pain of those who mourned him. Soto writes that

[s]omething happened in our family without us becoming aware, a quiet between mother and children settled on us like dust. We went to school, ate, watched television that wasn't funny, and because mother never said anything, father … became that name we never said in our house. His grave was something we saw in photographs; his remembrance those clothes hanging in the back of the closet. (Lesser Evils 83)

For Soto the task of resurrecting his father's spirit on the printed page is a compelling one, made more difficult by his family's continuing taciturnity. Yet for the reader who accompanies Soto on his poetic journey, fresh meanings reveal themselves with each new work. Decades pass and father is still that name never spoken within the family but it is also the name that recurs more and more frequently in the heart and poetry of his son. In “Another Time” from the 1990 collection Who Will Know Us? Soto writes:

… Like father,
whom we miss and don't know,
Who would have saved us
From those terrible years
If that day at work he got up
Hurt but alive. He fell
From that ladder with an upturned palm,
With the eyes of watery light.
We went on with sorrow that found no tree
To cry from. I can't go to his grave.
I know this. I can't find my place
Or wake up and say, Let him walk,
Let him round the house but not come in.
Even the sun with so much to give must fall.

(97-98)

A year later in “Fall and Spring,” from his collection of poems entitled Home Course in Religion, Soto uses a conversation with Scott, his boyhood best friend, to diffuse the layers of time and silence that conceal the events surrounding Manuel Soto's death.

… About then I began saying things like,
Scott, I think I lived before. Or, Scotty,
I have feelings around my eyes like I'm Chinese.
He let me say these things and still be his friend. He told me
That his father was dead. I ran sand through my fingers.
I told him that when my father died
My uncle heard gravel crunch in the path
That ran along our house, and rock was one of
The things God told us to look out for.

It may be that Gary Soto has only begun to write about the mystery and opacity of this profoundly important element of his experience and that we can expect to see the character and essence of Manuel Soto reanimated in his future work. Soto continues to honor his father in a fascinating pattern of discovery throughout his poetry and prose; each time he invokes his father in his writing, Soto beams new light on their unique relationship and on the damage that enforced silence inflicts on those who grieve the death of their beloved. With the apparent wealth of emotional territory that he has yet to explore, Soto may develop into a novel the theme of a child's early loss of a parent and the silence that often follows it.

Soto began to write at the age of twenty. A student at California State University at Fresno, Soto “lucked into” poet Philip Levine's creative writing class. He describes his chance meeting with Levine—and his first glimpse into his future as a writer—as pure kismet. When asked what would have happened if he hadn't ventured into Levine's class, Soto answered that he'd be mowing lawns in Fresno. Soto is an engaging conversationalist with a penchant for wry observations; his account of his own experiences is often peppered with jokes. Asked if he is serious, he assures listeners that he is.

Soto's discovery of his poetic voice coincided with a recognition of his own alienation: he realized that he was estranged not only from the culture of his heritage, but also from the Anglo world which simultaneously beckoned to him and rejected him. He experienced the epiphany of his otherness when he came upon a poem called “Unwanted” by Edward Field. Reading it, Soto saw his own aloneness described; additionally, the poem presented him with the first suggestion that he too was capable of satisfying himself and affecting others with the power of his words. What's more, in Field's poem Soto discerned that a sense of alienation was not unique to him but rather, “it was a human pain.”

In 1974 Gary Soto graduated magna cum laude from California State University, Fresno. The next year he married Carolyn Oda, also a Fresno native, whom he'd met when he was twenty after she moved into the house next door to the apartment that Gary shared with his brother Rick. The brothers were “college poor,” living on the food that Gary could take from their mother's refrigerator when Rick “called her into the backyard about a missing sock from his laundry—a ploy from the start.” One day, walking home from the store, Soto saw Carolyn cracking walnuts on her front porch. During the next few weeks Gary artfully plotted, contriving numerous excuses to walk past her house, sometimes resorting to a low crouch behind a hedge until Carolyn appeared to water her geranium or sweep off her porch. So began the romance that is the mainstay of Soto's emotional life.

a good Mexican girl—“no Okies, hijo. … ” For her, everyone who wasn't Mexican, black or Asian were Okies. The French were Okies, the Italians in suits were Okies. When I asked about Jews, whom I had read about, she asked for a picture. I rode home on my bicycle and returned with a calendar depicting the important races of the world. “Pues, si, son Okies tambien!” she said, nodding her head. She waved the calendar away and went to the living room where she lectured me on the virtues of the Mexican girl. (Faces 9)

But Gary fell in love with a Japanese American girl and their romance created a furor in his family. Gary's own fears were assuaged when he'd met Carolyn's parents, Japanese American farmers who had been imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. On his terrifying first visit with them, he was relieved to discover that “these people are just like Mexicans … poor people” (Faces 13). Now he had only to reassure his family. Soto writes about their anxious response to the news of his engagement to Carolyn

who worried my mother, who had my grandmother asking once again to see the calender of the Important Races of the World. I told her I had thrown it away years before. I took a much-glanced-at snapshot from my wallet. We looked at it together, in silence. Then Grandma reclined in her chair, lit a cigarette, and said, “Es pretty.” She blew and asked with all her worry pushed up to her forehead: “Chinese?” (Faces 11)

Five years after the marriage Carolyn gave birth to their daughter Mariko. Fatherhood stimulated Soto's imagination in a variety of ways. Often Mariko or some aspect of their relationship is the subject of a narrative recollection, or as in the instance he writes about in “Listening Up,” Soto appropriates the wisdom of her childish “turns of language” for his own use. He writes:

One summer I heard our three-year-old daughter Mariko say, “The days are filled with air,” and heard my writer self say, “That's mine. I said that. … ”

Little philosopher, sophist, wise-guy in a little girl's dress—she spoke a beautifully true line that suggests that the business of living (jobs, friends, love, failed love, and so on) is only air, and maybe not even blue air at that. All is transparent as air—a breeze here a strong gust there, and people and days pass from our lives. … I took my daughter's line and made a poem from it. (Faces 33-35)

In his mid-forties, his daughter Mariko off to college, Gary Soto continues to chart new literary territory, blazing untraveled paths. One of our nation's most prolific and versatile writers, Soto has in the last decade increased his audience with the publication of two children's picture books, two short story collections, four novels and three poetry collections for young readers, as well as three novels. His recently published novel, Jesse, chronicles the adventures of two brothers as they make the difficult transition from post-adolescence to early adulthood. By turns hilarious and thrilling, it is one of Soto's most satisfying revelations about a Catholic's relationship with God. Buried Onions, released in early 1997, is Soto's most recent work of prose.

Currently at work on a libretto entitled Nerd-landia, comissioned by the Los Angeles Opera for a 1998 production, Soto divides his time between writing and producing. Soto is a community activist who founds and supports many educational and cultural programs for Chicano/a youth. Every summer, interested young people from two small towns near Fresno take part in the Coalinga and Huron House Program, for example; they live in a Berkeley fraternity or sorority house and take accelerated high school courses at the university. Soto and others comprise the program's board of directors. Many high school drama students participate in a production of Soto's latest one-act play entitled Novio Boy. Introduced to Soto's work in their English classes, other students from all over the country have the opportunity to meet the author when he visits their school for a talk and a reading.

Soto renews his literary spirit and engages a growing readership as he turns his attention from the short story to the essay, from novel to film and drama, and from poetry to prose and then back again. His readers have come to expect a fresh approach with each work as it appears. In this way, Soto constantly updates his concerns and charges them with an ongoing urgency. In the twenty-second year of his career, the persistent themes of Soto's work—poverty, racism and alienation—appear in his work freshly minted with all the gleam of newly polished gold and silver. With the 1995 publication of New and Selected Poems—which was nominated for the National Book Award—Soto captures the attention of an ever expanding readership. Soto encourages talented, young emerging writers as he traverses the nation spreading news of their stories—some angry and bitter, all demanding to be heard. At the same time Soto ameliorates some of the pain of his people with his boundless energy; wherever he goes he excites in his audience the promise of a dream deferred—a nationwide Chicano/a community.

Although, at present, Mexican America's literary movement lacks a geographical meeting place, its center resides in the soul of its writers. Along with other members of the Chicano/a literati Soto creates a forum and a focus for their most urgent concerns: the future of a critical discourse, how to make the transition from small ethnic presses into the mainstream, and reaching a more encompassing readership. In the hearts and minds of his colleagues and his readers of all colors, Soto is an ally, an antidote to loneliness and the embodiment of a new era for American multi-ethnic literatures. Soto's voice is the sound of many voices speaking—over the kitchen table, out on the street, in classrooms everywhere—across the borderlands and through the years.

Additional coverage of Soto's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Artists and Authors for Young Adults, Vol. 10; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 19, 25; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 50, 74; Children's Literature Review, Vol. 38; Contemporary Literature Criticism, Vols. 32, 80; DISCovering Multicultural America; Hispanic Literature Criticism, Vol. 2; Hispanic Writers; Junior DISCovering Authors; Major Twentieth Century Writers; Something About the Author, Vol. 80.