Genaro González

Genaro González has had to steal hours from his busy career as a professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Pan American to further his career as a creative writer. González, born in McAllen, Texas, in 1949, was a participant in the early Chicano literary movement as a student at Claremont College in California. One of his early stories, “Un hijo del sol,” had the distinction of being included in a mainstream press’s first anthology of Chicano literature in 1970: The Chicano: From Caricature to Self-Portrait, edited by Edward Simmen for New American Library. His subsequent stories appeared in such national magazines as Nuestro, Denver Quarterly and The Americas Review. As a scholar, González has been the recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities and Fulbright/Hayes fellowships. As a creative writer he has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award (1990) and a Dobie Paisano Award from the Texas Institute of Letters (1990).

The success of Genaro González’s first novel, Rainbow’s End (1988), actually catapulted him back into an active creative writing career, a career that had languished somewhat all of those years that he had been studying psychology and working his way toward tenure as a professor. Rainbow’s End was selected “Editor’s choice” by The Los Angeles Times and received favorable reviews far and wide. Rainbow’s End charts generations of a Rio Grande Valley family as its members gradually leave migrant farm work behind to become drug smugglers. The novel is enriched with the detail from the geographical and cultural environment of the Valley and a broad array of interesting characters. Only Sons (1991) is a collection of interconnected stories that develop the theme of the generational differences of characters who live along the Mexican-American border. As in the story, “Too Much His Father’s Son,” selected for this present anthology, the greatest and most troubling differences are about values that are held by fathers and sons. Multicultural Review concluded that González’s stories “are fueled by genuinely felt emotion and a vision broader than any border, without barriers. Only Sons belongs on that shelf of good books about modern family relationships.”