By Catherine Caulfield. Harper
& Row. 304 pp. $19.95
Peter F. Klarkn
he Real Life of Alejandro
Mayta (1986), Mario Vargas
Llosa's fictional portrait of
a Peruvian revolutionary,
captures in its opening
pages the desperate poverty that has become commonplace throughout the South American nation. The narrator of the novel, a writer himself, is out for an early morning jog through his neighbor- hood when he comes across "stray kids, stray men, and stray women along with the stray dogs, all painstakingly digging through the trash looking for...
he Real Life of Alejandro
Mayta (1986), Mario Vargas
Llosa's fictional portrait of
a Peruvian revolutionary,
captures in its opening
pages the desperate poverty that has become commonplace throughout the South American nation. The narrator of the novel, a writer himself, is out for an early morning jog through his neighbor- hood when he comes across "stray kids, stray men, and stray women along with the stray dogs, all painstakingly digging through the trash looking for something to...
The Indians of Brazil have been much in the news
lately. In the summer of
1988, Kayapo from the
northern state of Para sat
for several weeks in the an- techambers of parliament while delegates drafted the new constitution of Brazil. They were there, in tribal paint and feathers, to urge the delegates to guarantee Indian rights. In March 1989, the same Kayapo In- dians played host to a week-long Indian summit meeting at Altarnira in the heart of the Amazon to protest the building of dams t...
RAD ON 0
by Richard N.Adams
etween 1979 and 1984, the government of Guatemala added a particularly tragic chapter to this century's chronicle of "civilized" bru- tality. In the name of quell-
ing a leftist insurgency movement in the northern departments of the nation, the successive military regimes of General Lu- cas Garcia and General Rios Montt directed a campaign of mass terror against the na- tion's Indian population-a campaign so bloody that it recalled the worst atrocities of...
Guatemala is the only country in Central
America with a large In-
dian population. The In-
dians, mostly of Mayan
ancestry, are probably a majority, although it is hard to know for sure since there is much debate over who is, and who is not, an indigena. Once a fam- ily of Indians moves to the city, they can turn themselves into ladinos (as mestizos are called in much of Central America) af-ter a couple of generations if they learn to think and behave like ladinos-that is, if they speak o...
am a fortyish, middle-class, black American male, with a teaching po- sition at a large state university in California. I have owned my own home for more than ten years, as well as the two cars that are the minimal requirement for life in California. And I will confess to a moderate strain of yuppie hedonism. Year after year my two children are the sole representatives of their race in their classrooms, a fact they sometimes have difficulty remembering. We are the only black family in our subur-...
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The Wild West looms nowhere nearly sb large in the American imagination today as it did only a generation ago. Children whose parents were reared on Bat Masterson during the 1950s now dream of Masters of the Universe. On those rare occasions when Hollywood still deigns to put on spurs and six-shooters, it is more likely to deliver comic send-ups like Blazing Saddles and Silverado than heroic sagas like High Noon and The Magnificent Seven. The western myth was popular- ized by moviemakers,...
he tragic god of the indus-
trial West was once Prome-
theus, who still holds the
place of honor at the Rocke-
feller Center skating rink. If a-
statue for the year 2000 is needed, it perhaps should be of King Tan- talus, son of Zeus, who according to one account brought secrets-information rather than fire-from the gods to human- ity. For this theft he was cruelly punished in the netherworld: The water in which he was condemned eternally to stand would recede whenever he leaned over to...
Ithink of Warrenpoint as a town, not as a village. In my private diction-
ary a village is a community sur-
rounded by fields: The people are
farmers, or they serve farmers and
their families as shopkeepers, nurses, doctors, teachers, priests. At Sun- day Mass the men wear caps, not hats, and after Mass they stand around the church to chat, gossip, or stare at the hills. A town, small or large, is not dependent on the, land that surrounds it; it opens on a differ- ent world. Tullow, in Co...