Ronald Francis Arias (born November 30, 1941) is an American former senior writer and correspondent for People magazine and People en Español. He is also a highly regarded author whose novelThe Road to Tamazunchale has been recognized as a milestone in Mexican-American literature.[2]
About Arias' fiction anthology, The Wetback and Other Stories (2016), author Paul Theroux writes, "I felt reading these wonderful stories that I was admitted to an adjacent neighborhood, a rich culture that is another world—call it Amexica—both mysterious and magical, that is persuasive through its tenderness. My hope is that Ron Arias continues to write short stories that tell us who we are."[3][4]
In 1985 Arias began work as a People magazine senior writer with a global beat. His feature byline stories focused on all manner of people in war, famine, hurricanes, earthquakes and other calamities.[7]
Of his time as the magazine's parachute journalist, Arias has said, "On every continent, I covered five wars, famine, earthquakes, hurricanes, all kinds of disasters in Haiti, Somalia, Ethiopia, Australia, Vietnam, Moscow, you name it." His first major disaster article was the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which he was assigned simply because he was the only staff member fluent in Spanish.[8]
Literary work
Arias' work is influenced by twentieth-century Latin American literature[9] and he has been called "a post-modernist who integrates in his fiction a keen eye for actual Mexican-American experience."[10]
The Road to Tamazunchale
Arias' best known work is the novel The Road to Tamazunchale, for which numerous critical studies exist. The Road to Tamazunchale depicts the last days of Fausto Tejada, an old widower being cared for by his teenage niece in Los Angeles and occasionally visited by the spirit of his dead wife. Fausto spends his final days in a number of fantastic scenarios that suggest magic realism.[citation needed]
Tamazunchale, while a real place, serves here as a metaphorical place, a magical place where wishes come true but that can never really be reached; the real town is never shown in the novel, but is used in the fantastical play that Fausto and his neighbors create called "The Road to Tamazunchale". The novel radically breaks with the tradition of Chicano literature that focuses on learning to understand reality, constructing a Chicano version of history and bringing order to the world. Instead, Arias' protagonist is more a creator of worlds than an interpreter of them.[11]
Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide's entry for Arias describes The Road to Tamazunchale as a breakthrough work of Chicano fiction:
It may be that future historians of American literature will look back on The Road to Tamazunchale as critics now look at Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: as the foundation piece by which Joyce emerges from the matrix of his marginal, minority culture to transform its localism into enduring and lucid literary symbols relevant to the universal human experience.[5]
A feature film adaptation of The Road to Tamazunchale entitled Fausto's Road is in the works.[12]
The Wetback and Other Stories
According to Arias himself, The Wetback and Other Stories, a collection of short stories inspired by the Mexican-American denizens of the Elysian Valley of his youth, is an attempt to "bridge the white world and the darker Spanish-speaking world":
They are right next door, they are in our backyards, they take care of our kids, they wash our dishes... who are these people? This is who they are. It's a literary treatment or peek at that but... I want to humanize Mexicans or people from my kind of background, not just Mexicans, but all Latin Americans because I do have their perspective.[13]
Gardens of Plenty
In 2024, Arias published Gardens of Plenty, his historical novel about the adventures of Joseph Fields, a teenage orphan who flees the squalor of 16th-century London aboard a British slave ship and finds himself shipwrecked in colonial Mexico.[14]
Personal life
While a student at UCLA, Arias met and quickly married his wife Joan, then working towards her doctorate in Hispanic languages and literature.[15] Their only son is filmmaker Michael Arias, currently residing in Tokyo, Japan.[16]
Arias is an accomplished potter (retiring from People having ignited a previously dormant passion for the fine arts).[17][18]
The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) — Arias' seminal novel about the fantastical journeys of an old man approaching death, National Book Award nominee.[19]
The Wetback and Other Stories (2016) — a collection of short fiction about the Mexican-American inhabitants of Los Angeles' Elysian Valley neighborhood.
Gardens of Plenty (2024) — a historical adventure novel set in the 16th century.
Non-fiction
Five Against the Sea (1988) — survival tale of five men who survived 142 days drifting at sea
Healing from the Heart (1988) with Dr. Mehmet Oz — famed surgeon Mehmet Oz relates his experiences combining modern and traditional medical therapies
Moving Target: A Memoir of Pursuit (2002) — Arias' childhood recollections and the search for his POW father, Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award recipient[21]
White's Rules: Saving Our Youth One Kid at a Time (2007) with Paul D. White — story of a Canoga Park school teacher's response to the killing of a student
My Life as a Pencil (2015) — a collection of essays about Arias' travels as a journalist
Notable articles
"Red agitation Peru Indians stirred", Christian Science Monitor (October 5, 1965) as Ronald Arias — Peru government crackdown on an indigenous guerrilla uprising
"The Rooster That Called Me Home", The Nation (June 18, 1983)
^"Obituary: Joan M. Arias". claremont-courier.com. Claremon Courier. December 20, 2017. Retrieved February 23, 2024.
^Martínez, Eliud (1987). "Ron Arias' The Road to Tamazunchale: Cultural Inheritance and Literary Expression". The Road To Tamazunchale. By Arias, Ron. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press. ISBN9780916950705. The Road to Tamazunchale, then is a carefully crafted work which exhibits and places in the service of Chicano literature a large number of artistic resources. For this reason it has been a pacesetter and it marks a new direction for Chicano literature.
^Luis Leal and Manuel M. Martin-Rodríguez, "Chicano Literature", The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (eds Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker), pg. 573.
^"Fausto's Road". IMDbPro. February 16, 2015. Retrieved October 18, 2016.
^"100 YEARS OF LATINO LITERATURE". latinopia.com. March 6, 2010. Retrieved October 13, 2016. ... 1975 At the University of California at Irvine, writer Alejandro Morales and his colleagues at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese institute the Chicano Literary Prize. The first, second and third prize winner are Ron Arias for The Wetback ...
Bruce-Novoa, Juan; "Interview with Ron Arias" Journal of Ethnic Studies, 1976 Winter; 3 (4): 69-73.
Martinez, Eliud; "Ron Arias' The Road to Tamazunchale: Novel of the New Reality" Latin American Literary Review, 1977; 10: 51-63.
Gingerich, Willard. "Aspects of Prose Style in Three Chicano Novels: Pocho, Bless Me, Ultima, and The Road to Tamazunchale" pp. 206–228 IN: Ornstein-Galicia, Jacob (ed.); Metcalf, Allan (bibliog.); Form and Function in Chicano English. Rowley, MA: Newbury House; 1984.
Nieto, Eva Margarita. "The Dialectics of Textual Interpolation in Ron Arias' The Road to Tamazunchale" pp. 239–246 IN: Lattin, Vernon E. (ed.); Contemporary Chicano Fiction: A Critical Survey. Binghamton, NY: Bilingual; 1986.
Lerat, Christian. "Ultime va-et-vient entre l'ici et l'ailleurs dans The Road to Tamazunchale" pp. 189–202 IN: Béranger, Jean (ed.); L'Ici et l'ailleurs: Multilinguisme et multiculturalisme en Amérique du Nord. Bordeaux: Presses de l'Université de Bordeaux; 1991.
Fabre, Geneviève; "Leave-Taking and Retrieving in The Road to Tamazunchale and The Ultraviolet Sky" The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe, 1991 May-Dec; 16 (2-3): 171-79.
Herrera, Andrea O'Reilly; "Ron Arias' The Road to Tamazunchale and the Idea of Death" The Americas Review: A Review of Hispanic Literature and Art of the USA, 1994 Fall-Winter; 22 (3-4): 114-24.
Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M. "Border Crisscrossing: The (Long and Winding) Road to Tamazunchale". pp. 181–206 IN: Hawley, John C. (ed. and introd.); Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders. Albany, NY: State U of New York P; 1996.
