Max Martínez

Max Martinez’s career as a writer spans the full course of the development of contemporary Chicano literature. In the late 1960’s he became active in the Chicano literary movement in San Antonio. By the early 1970’s, he began publishing his stories in the short lived El magazin and the seminal pulp literary magazine, Caracol. Having lived the life of a sailor, a stockbroker and freelance writer, Martinez attempted to settle down into a more stable intellectual environment by studying for his Ph.D. in English at the University of Denver and pursuing a career as a college professor at the University of Houston. But it turned out that neither was for him: he never wrote the dissertation and he abandoned the tenure track by the mid-1980’s to continue to dedicate himself to serious writing.

Aside from numerous stories published in a variety of literary magazines—as well as hundreds of “man on the scene” commentary and thought pieces that he writes for a trade journal—the fruits of Martinez’s labors have been three very different books. The first is a collection of his early short stories, The Adventures of the Chicano Kid and Other Stories (1983), in which he experiments with a variety of styles while depicting the various types of Chicano lives: a farmworker, a middle class suburban businessman (today what would be called a yuppy), an educated self-confident modern Chicano in a face-off with traditional rural prejudice in the person of a Texas “redneck,” an old man snoozing on a park bench and recollecting how things have changed, and others. The title story is a satire of nineteenth-century dime novels. “Faustino,” included in this present anthology, is an outrageously inventive tale that portrays the various levels of oppression in a rural, stratified setting, very similar to Martinez’s own place of rearing in the central Texas farm country.

Martinez’s novel, Schoolland (1988), chronicles a single, critical year in the coming of age of the child narrator in the Texas farm town of Schoolland during the 1953 drought, the same year that his role-model grandfather dies. And, Martinez’s latest book, Red Bikini Dream (1990), is another collection of lives as recreated in the short story genre, Martinez’s forte. Here the life histories and angst of a variety of Chicano and non-Chicano characters are deftly drawn, again giving us glimpses of Martinez’s own life as a struggling writer in New York, as a sailor, as a child growing up in a fatherless home. The Review of Contemporary Fiction concluded that the stories in Red Bikini Dream “offer a disturbing glimpse of the complex relationship between self and culture that underlies modern life,” while The Bloomsbury Review stated that Martinez “knows how to twist a wicked smile out of his characters, while making marvelous statements on who we are and where we are headed.”