Famous All Over Town (Danny Santiago)

In the novel Famous All Over Town, Danny Santiago writes about the barrio in East Los Angeles, a whole world away from the experience of most of the residents of the city. The author details the life of this subculture, how it has developed as a reflection of the culture of Mexico and how the original culture is challenged and altered in the American context. The life of the barrio is presented here as difficult and even dangerous, producing generation after generation of angry and defiant youth who strike back at all of society for the world into which they have been born. One of the themes in this novel related to the production of these angry young people is parenting and the way young people come to see their parents in a new light as they (the children) grow up and measure their reality against the ideal they have been taught and against the image projected by the larger white society in which they find themselves, an image that is itself distorted and false.

Chato Medina, the protagonist of this novel, has reached a crossroads and must decide what to do with his life. In order to make that decision, he thinks back through his memories of the past: "Maybe if I relived my yesterdays I could be surer of my tomorrows" (8). In reliving those yesterdays, he also relives his sense of his parents and how that sense changed. The sorts of changes noted for Chato are not unique to his situation. Every child begins as he begins--parents are simply accepted as a given, a p

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ther says his sister has not raised the subject because it is none of her business, and she says it is none of Chato's business, either (147)--but Chato does care. It is clear he feels deeply betrayed. He first rushes home filled with anger to tell his mother, and when he does not get the reaction he expects, he is dumbfounded and cannot let go of the anger building inside him. He waits for his father to return so he can throw his new-found knowledge up in the other man's face, but his father does not come home that night: I didn't care to leave the house. My friends would see the story in my face if they didn't know already. . . He was already at work when I woke up Monday and I went to school with my message still rumbling around inside me (149). Chato shows here how much his own sense of self is tied with his view of his parents--he is concerned about how this knowledge affects him, how his friends will feel, how the entire world views this boy whose father is unfaithful. Chato's meeting with Pelon becomes a way of expressing his independence, leading to tragedy and his arrest. The two steal a car, and in the ensuing chase a policeman shoots and kills Pelon. A social worker at Juvenile Hall reads a report on Chato whi

Category: Literature - F