Challenges Give Meaning to Our Lives: Francisco Jiménez and Social Justice

ALAN Review, Fall 2004 by Carlile, Susan

In conversation, as in his books, Francisco Jiménez inspires a deep sense of respect for the universality of the human experience. Jiménez, winner of the American Library Association Pura Belpré Honor Book Award (2001) and the Carnegie Foundation Outstanding U.S. Professor of the Year (2002), has dedicated his life to encouraging communication between people with a wide range of backgrounds. Jiménez is one of those rare individuals who is completely at home in many environments and recently commented in an extensive interview in July about his life and his works. His confident tranquility reveals a sharp-minded, gracious individual who has a deep compassion for people of every generation. Throughout his career as a teacher and administrator at Santa Clara University, as well as in his work as a literary scholar and fiction writer, his "hope and whole focus" has been to "promote the acceptance and appreciation of cultural differences."

Jiménez's journey has been full of obstacles, and he has found consolation in writing down his life story. His love for young people and his respect for the challenges of growing up inspired him to compile his stories into four award-winning books-The Circuit: The Life of a Migrant Child (University of New Mexico, 1997), LaMariposa (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), The Christmas Gift/El Regalo de Navidad (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) and Breaking Through (Houghton Mifflin, 2001)-which recount his experiences leaving his birthplace of San Pedro, Tlaquepaque, Mexico, at the age of four and becoming a California migrant worker with an insatiable appetite for learning. The first line of Breaking Through strikingly illustrates the challenges of his early life, "I lived in constant fear for ten long years, from the time I was four until I was fourteen years old" (1). With the haunting possibility of deportation constantly on his mind, Jiménez could not have guessed that one day he would receive numerous prestigious teaching and writing awards in the United States. Today he is a successful writer with many more stories to tell.

The Writing Life

Jiménez did not begin writing creatively with the intention of exclusively appealing to children or young adults. He simply felt he had a story to tell. He had jotted down thoughts about his life while in college and at Columbia University as a graduate student. However, it was not until his graduate advisor encouraged him to put these thoughts into stories that he considered them for publication. Jiménez explains, "When I tried to capture the child's voice, the emotions would come out in Spanish." In 1972 he published two short stories in Spanish, "Muerte Fria"/ "Cold Death," and "Un Aguinaldo"/ "The Christmas Gift" in El Onto: Journal of Contemporary MexicanAmerican Thought. His widely successful "The Circuit" first appeared in 1973 in Spanish as "La Mudanza"/ "The Move" (later "Cajas de Carton") for a New York literary journal. And in 1974 "Arado sin Buey"/ "Plough without an Ox" appeared in The Bilingual Review.

Jiménez's first fictional success was his short story "The Circuit," published in 1973 in the Arizona Quarterly, where it received the Best Short Fiction Award. In this story Jiménez recounts a life lived out of cardboard boxes, the title he gave the Spanish version, "Cajas de Carton." Moving from one tent labor camp to the next, Francisco, the main character, describes the loneliness of never settling down. "'Ya esora' (Quitting time) [Ito] yelled in his broken Spanish. Those were the words I waited for twelve hours a day, every day, seven days a week, week after week. And the thought of not hearing them again saddened me" (The Circuit 73). After moving to a labor camp in Fresno, California, Francisco finally feels a sense of place again. His sixth-grade teacher, "my best friend at school," offered to teach him to play the trumpet and he raced home to tell his family the good news, "when I opened the door to our shack, 1 saw that everything we owned was neatly packed in cardboard boxes" (83). The pain of never settling down is poignant, yet Francisco learns to find something good about every situation. To Jiménez's surprise this short story became a favorite in textbooks and anthologies and has been reprinted 121 times.

As much as Jiménez would have liked to return to fiction writing, he found himself beginning his life as a professor and, soon after, university administrator and did not have the time to pursue his love of telling stories for over twenty years. As "The Circuit" continued to receive such overwhelming attention, Jiménez realized that there was a significant popular interest in his experiences. Rudolfo Anaya, author of the awardwinning novel Bless Me Ultima, was also supportive of his desire to flesh out more of his childhood story. With a sabbatical from Santa Clara University in 1995, Jiménez went back to his successful short story and added eleven more to create the expertly woven collection The Circuit, which documents Jiménez's experience traveling with his family from Mexico into California. He explains in detail what happened when they reached Ia frontera: "We walked along the wire wall until Papa spotted a small hole underneath the fence. Papá got on his knees and, with his hands, made the opening larger. We all crawled through like snakes" and into the sometimes brutal realities of migrant labor camps.