GARY SOTO BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gary Soto was born and raised in Fresno California; he is the author of ten poetry collections for adults and many books for young adults and children. Having a Latin background, Gary Soto writes mainly for Chicano (Mexican-American) readers. Among the most outstanding things that he does is serving as young people's ambassador for the California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) and the United Farm Workers of America (UFW). The fact that Gary Soto was born in the bay area makes him an attractive author to those who live in the same area because he usually writes about issues that had happen or that are happening in this area. In many of his stories Gary Soto uses the name of cities and places that almost every one who lives in the bay are know, so it is very fun to read about places that you know.
Taking into account that Gary Soto is a Chicano writer it would be a good idea to teach his books in those schools with a considerable Mexican-American population. Students in this school would have an easier time understanding and relating to the stories because they have the same background that Gary Soto has. Even though most of the books written by Gary Soto are intended to reach Chicano readers, they are not limited to those who do not have a Chicano background. Throughout many of his books Gary Soto constantly uses Spanish words and phrases to give a greater emphasis to his stories, but this fact does not necessarily affect those who do not speak the language since Gary Soto always includes a vocabulary list that translates the words and phrases to English at the end of the book. Gary Soto�s books could also be used in the classroom with those students who are Spanish learners; they will find these books very helpful when it comes to learning new words. When Gary Soto uses a Spanish word in a sentence it is not hard to figure out the meaning of the word because the rest of the sentence is usually written in English, fact that facilitates the process of making sense out of the unknown word.
According to the book Literature for Today�s Young Adults, one of the characteristics that make the best modern young adult literature is when the body of the work includes stories about characters from many different ethnic and cultural groups.
All the books written by Gary Soto meet this characteristic, since he always uses characters from ethnic backgrounds in all the stories he writes. This book of Literature for Today�s Young Adults also has a list that honors the best modern young adult literature, one of the authors that can be found on this honor list is Gary Soto who appears with his realistic novel Buried Onions.
Unit Plan: http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/soto.htm
Information
on Cinco de Mayo; teaching/learning
activities;
poetry; dramatics and role playing;
bibliography;
Big Bushy Mustache
Creating a Free Verse Narrative Poem
Grade
7, English & language arts; free verse, narrative poetry;
A
Fire in My Hands: A Book of Poems
Changes (Theme)
doc
file; Grade 6; includes short story suggestions;
scope
& sequence; from State of Texas
Guide for "A Fire in My Hands
Anticipation
guide. Grades 5-8. From KidReach
Short Stories
Grade
8; teacher cyberguide from SCORE;
"Baseball
in April" & "Living Up the Street"
Taking Sides
Grades
8 & 9; theme: finding your identity; biography;
from
McDougal Littell
Buried Onions
Soto, Gary. Buried Onions. Harcourt Brace, 1997.
Eddie struggles to avoid gangs in avenging the murder of his cousin.
Eddie can always smell onions in the air--the sharp bitter odor of hopelessness and anger that haunts the poor side of Fresno. "I had a theory about those vapors, which were not released by the sun's heat but by a huge onion buried under the city. This onion made us cry. Tears leapt from our eyelashes and stained our faces." Eddie tries to escape from the poverty and gang society that surrounds him by taking vocational classes and staying away from his old "cholos," (gang friends). But when his cousin is killed, his aunt urges him to seek out and punish the murderer. To avoid the pressure building in his neighborhood, Eddie takes a landscaping job in an affluent suburb. But this too goes awry when his boss's truck is stolen while in his care. In the end, with his money gone and a dangerous gang member stalking him, Eddie's only choice is to join the military and hope that they can give him a better future than the one Fresno seems to offer.
By: Amazon.com
Novio Boy, a play
Soto, Gary. Novio Boy. New York: Hardcourt Brace & Company, 1997.
In this humorous play, 9th-grade Rudy asks an 11th-grade "older" woman for a date. A Chicano play that has been performed in schools throughout the Southwest and California.
Rudy prepares for his first date with a girl who is older than he is. When Patricia, a high school junior, agrees to go to lunch with ninth-grader Rudy, the apprehensive boy seeks dating advice from his friend Alex, who says, "Just level with her. Tell her you're sorry you look like you do." Even less useful advice comes from Rudy's Uncle Juan: "Worry about what you have to say, little Romeo....The first time I went out with a girl, man, I freaked her out. I told her that I thought I had been captured by a UFO." Now even more nervous, Rudy asks his mother for money, only to hear, "You think money grows on trees?" Unfortunately for Rudy, his luck does not improve by the final scene in which Alex, Uncle Juan, and Rudy's mother all appear at the restaurant to witness the date. Soto again proves he knows what makes young adults laugh, like throwing up huevos con weenies (scrambled eggs with hot dogs) and hearing about G.I. Joe beating up Ken.
By: School Library Journal
Nerdlandia: a Play
Soto, Gary. Nerdlania : A Play. New York: Paper Star, 1999.
A humorous play in which Martin, a Chicano nerd, undergoes a transformation with the help of his friends and experiences true love. Includes a glossary of Spanish words and phrases used in the dialogue.
By: Barnes & Noble.
This play set in the Los Angeles Barrio is filled with stock
characters: Martin, a Chicano nerd who wears glasses, a calculator on his belt,
and pants hiked up to his chest; homeboys who sport greased hair and tattoos;
and chola girls who have dark lipstick and painted nails. Martin tries to be
one of the homies in order to win his idealized love, Ceci. Ironically, Ceci
has just ended her relationship with her two-timing boyfriend and now decides
that a sweet, intelligent guy like Martin is just what she needs. She, in turn,
tries to become more nerdlike to win his affections, which includes shopping at
"Nerdstroms." Language is a parody of street slang and Spanish
phrases. Billed as a comedy, the dialogue often falls flat. Characters have
little motivation for their actions. Short on entertainment, but long on
stereotypes.
Reviewed by Amazon.com
The Afterlife
Soto, Gary. The Afterlife. New York: Harcourt; Inc., 2003.
A love story, this is the sequel to Soto�s popular novel
Buried Onions.
Soto's twist on the emerging subgenre of narratives in the vein of Alice
Sebold's The Lovely Bones (Little, Brown, 2002) offers a compelling character
in the person of 17-year-old Chuy, murdered in the men's room of a dance hall
the evening he plans to connect with the girl of his heart's desire.
Unfortunately for both Chuy and readers, what happens after death is that the
teen's once engaged and engaging spirit seems to dissipate along with his
"ghost body." He floats around Fresno, CA, making seemingly random
sightings of his murderer, local kids, and-only after a couple of days and at a
time when his ghost body is beginning to dissolve limb by limb-other ghosts. He
finds a new heartthrob in the form of a teen who has committed suicide and is
befriended by the wise ghost of a transient whose life he tried to save.
Grieving friends and family unknowingly are visited by Chuy, and he is startled
to discover that his mother wants violent revenge for his death. This plethora
of plot lines wafts across and past the landscape of a narrative as lacking in
developed form as Chuy finds himself becoming. After a strong start, The
Afterlife seems to become a series of brief images that drift off as though in
a dream. Soto's simple and poetic language, leavened with Mexican Spanish with
such care to context that the appended glossary is scarcely needed, is clear,
but Chuy's ultimate destiny isn't.
By: Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Jesse
Soto, Gary. Jesse. Harcourt Brace, 1994.
Jesse struggles to find himself and a meaningful life in spite of the limits placed on him by poverty and prejudice. All in all, a highly readable novel that contains strands of both humor and despair.
To escape a home dominated by his
alcoholic stepfather, 17-year-old Jesse abruptly leaves high school, moves into
an apartment with his older brother, Abel, and takes classes at Fresno City
College. It is 1968, and the brothers face both the threat�20of being drafted
and the daily grind of their poverty. Racial and class prejudice limit their
employment opportunities to field labor, and they pick melons, oranges, or
cotton, depending on the season. Soto skillfully reveals the truth about the
brothers' lives through details: in a particularly wrenching scene, they try
hitchhiking to Pismo Beach�20for their spring break. Stranded for several days
along the road, they shiver together through the night, never reaching the
ocean. Jesse is artistically gifted and shy around girls; his struggles to
communicate with girls, to date, and to succeed both socially and academically
in school transcend the specifics of race and class. But Soto's story of a
particular Mexican American boy in Fresno, California, during the height of the
Vietnam War is rich in the details of Jesse's life and culture--his friendships
with other Mexican Americans, his involvement in Caesar Chavez's farm workers'
movement, his struggles to find himself and a meaningful life in spite of the
limits placed on him by poverty and prejudice.
By: Amazon.com
A Summer Life
Soto, Gary. A Summer Life. Laurel Leaf, 1991.
More recollections of growing up in Fresno. These small
snapshot-like stories appeal to high school and college students.
Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground
level." In this lively collection of short essays, Soto takes his reader
to a ground-level perspective, resreating in vivid detail the sights, sounds,
smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California,
neighborhood. The "things" of his boyhood tie it all together: his
Buddha "splotched with gold," the taps of his shoes and the
"engines of sparks that lived beneath my soles," his worn tennies
smelling of "summer grass, asphalt, the moist sock breathing the defeat of
basesall." The child's world is made up of small things--small, very
important things.
By: Amazon.com
Nickel and Dime
Soto, Gary. Nickel and Dime. 1st ed. University of New Mexico Press, 2000.
In these powerful, immensely affecting linked stories, Soto follows three Mexican-American men-two down-and-out security guards and an aging poet-as they wonder through Oakland, trying to salvage their broken lives.
By: http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=4949
Amnesia in a Republican
County
Soto, Gary. Amnesia in a Republican County. 1st ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2003.
Hilarious new adult novel
Silver Mendez, veteran Chicano poet, is always looking for a way to guarantee himself three square meals a day and a roof over his head. As this latest account of Silver�s misadventures begins, our hero reaches for a typewriter on a high shelf. When it comes crashing down on his head he is knocked unconscious. He awakes with no idea where he is or why. Soon he discovers that he is in his office at a Baptist college in the Simi Valley of southern California, a place that is familiar to many Americans as the home of many of the jurors who tried and convicted Rodney King in the 1990s. Silver has become a professor of English! Moreover, as he soon discovers to his horror, he is having an affair with the wife of the college president. And someone seems to be selling drugs on campus and Silver seems to be involved though he doesn�t know how.
By: Amazon.com
Petty Crimes
Soto, Gary. Petty Crimes.
Harcourt Brace, 1998.
In this sharply honed collection of stories, Mexican American children on the
brink of adolescence are testing the waters, trying to find their place in a
world ruled by gangs and "marked with graffiti, boom boxes, lean dogs
behind fences...." Some characters (La G?era, a shoplifter, and Mario, a
scam artist) are already on their way to becoming juvenile delinquents. Others
have chosen a straighter path. Most, however, are caught somewhere in the
middle, swimming against a current of violence. Norma finds it much harder than
she imagined to protect a doll put under her care for a social studies
experiment. Rudy learns the meaning of defeat during a boxing match against a
boy much smaller than himself. With a rare mix of compassion and irony, Soto
(Buried Onions) crystallizes moments signifying the loss of innocence. His
pithy last liners ("The vatos locos walked slowly away, their heads
directed toward the future, and their bodies already half dressed for their
funerals") will stop readers in their tracks, leaving them to digest the
meaning of his words and ponder the fates of his protagonists.
By: Amazon.com
Local News
Soto, Gary. Local News.
Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Much as he did in Baseball in April (HBJ, 1990), Soto uses his ability to see
the story in everyday experiences and to create ordinary, yet distinctly
individual and credible characters to charm readers into another world. He uses
his poetic writing style and the Spanish of the Mexican-American community in
the San Diego area to create 13 new stories for this book. The appended list of
terms and phrases will be useful to readers unfamiliar with the language,
although many of the terms used are not included in the list. The book will be
as popular as a collection of stories about young people as it will be useful
for starting discussions regarding sibling rivalry, self-image, growing up,
cultures, or writing styles.
By: Dona Weisman, Northeast Texas Library System, Garland
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Baseball in April
Soto, Gary. Baseball in April. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1990.
Insightful about the characteristics of early adolescents, Soto
tells 11 short stories about everyday problems of growing up. Latinos in
central California are the focus of the stories, but the events are typical of
young teens anywhere in the United States. The main characters try out for
Little League teams, take karate lessons, try to get the attention of the
opposite sex, and are embarrassed by their grandparents' behavior. These
day-to-day events reveal the sensitivity, humor, and vulnerability of today's
young people. The descriptions and dialogue are used to advantage, helping to
create and sustain the mood. A glossary of Spanish terms is included. Young
readers should easily identify with the situations, emotions, and outcomes
presented in these fine short stories.
By: Janice C. Hayes, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro
Too Many Tamales
Soto, Gary. Too Many Tamales. New York: Putnam, 1993.
Maria is feeling so grown-up, wearing her mother's apron and helping to knead
the masa for the Christmas corn tamales. Her mother even let Maria wear
some perfume and lipstick for the big family celebration that evening. When her
mother takes off her diamond ring so it won't become coated with the messy
masa, Maria decides that life would be perfect if she could wear the ring, too.
Trouble begins when she sneakily slips the sparkly ring on her thumb and resumes
her kneading. Uh oh. It is not until later that night, after all the tamales
have been cooked and after all her cousins and relatives have arrived, that
Maria suddenly realizes what must have happened to the precious ring. Ed
Martinez's warm oil paintings celebrate the riches of South American Christmas
colors--adobe reds, dusty gold, lacey whites, and rain-forest greens. Martinez
also has a gift for capturing children's animated expressions, especially when
Maria begs her cousins to help her find the missing ring by secretly eating the
enormous stack of steaming tamales! Gary Soto's delightful Christmas-spirit
closure will relieve young readers who empathize with the negligent Maria.
Grown-ups, too, will appreciate this playful reminder about the virtues of
forgiveness and family togetherness.
By: Amazon.com