37 pages • 1 hour read
Ernesto GalarzaBarrio Boy
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
As an adult, Ernesto Galarza frequently told stories about his childhood in Mexico and his experiences immigrating to the United States. He was encouraged to write down his experiences in a memoir, which became Barrio Boy. He describes the book as a series of “thumbnail sketches” that recount his own experiences from the perspective of a child but link to larger historical processes. He was motivated to write the memoir to push back against narratives that Mexican Americans had a damaged self-image due to the loss of their culture. The story is about his acculturation to American culture and how he maintained ties to his Mexican heritage.
Part 1 Summary: “In a Mountain Village”
Barrio Boy begins in Jalcocotán, or Jalco, a small village in the mountains of the Sierra Madre de Nayarit in Mexico where Ernesto Galarza was born in 1905. The village has one unpaved street that takes eight minutes to walk across. The street is lined with identical cottages made from adobe, or packed earth. The houses have no windows, steeped rooves made with palm thatch, and stone fences in the backyard. The street has no name, the houses have no numbers, and there are no lights. The village is very small and very remote: The main structures in the village are a chapel and a plaza, but there is no resident priest in the village. The priest only visits the town once or twice a year, so villagers have to travel to Tepic for religious matters. Likewise, there is no city government or administration, so the town square is empty.
The nearest city, Tepic, is accessible by a narrow, steep trail made for mule or donkey travel. El monte, or the mountain, is “a place of wonders as well as of dangers” (27). The village was built by “Indian ancestors” on a narrow, rocky terrace that was hard to get to, but the remote location protects the village from extreme weather like hurricanes. It also protects the villagers from outsiders. The biggest risk that the people in the village face is from animals in the forest, including bears, mountain lions, and rattlesnakes. The river, or arroyo, runs along the village and is central to the life of the town. Many of the men work in the forest growing crops. Others do wage labor on haciendas, large farming estates. The women stay at home and run the household.
After setting the scene of the town, Galarza turns to his house. Ernesto’s home is like every other house in Jalco. His family—his mother, Doña Henriqueta, and his two uncles José and Gustavo—moved to the town from nearby Miramar shortly before Ernesto was born. Ernesto’s father, Don Ernesto, stayed in Miramar. His parents were married after Doña Henriqueta got pregnant. His father was Lutheran, and his mother was Catholic, so they had a civil marriage, not a church wedding. Shortly after they got married, they were divorced. His mother received a sewing machine and a gold ring in the settlement. Ernesto reflects that he was an important part of the divorce negotiations, and as a result, “I earned my way from the start” (41), as the gold ring was pawned when his family needed money and his mother sewed and mended to pick up extra money, so the divorce settlement was important to his family’s financial stability.
Doña Henriqueta had family in Jalco, the Lopezes, and she moved there with her two brothers to start over shortly before Ernesto was born. Ernesto passes the days doing chores and playing with other children. The village doesn’t have a teacher or a school, and books are rare in the village. Book learning is limited to his mother’s cookbook, but history is passed down through oral storytelling and news is shared through word of mouth. This is how Ernesto’s family learns of trouble developing in the countryside between the porfistas (supporters of President Porfirio Díaz) and the maderistas (supporters of Don Francisco Madero, who ran against Díaz for President of Mexico). This conflict would lead to the Mexican Revolution in 1910. The revolution reaches the village when a band of rurales (Diaz’s police force) come to the village to seize arms and to enlist young men to fight in the president’s army. The men, including José and Gustavo, leave the village before the rurales arrive, and the villagers hide all of the weapons. Bolas, or revolutionary groups, also patrol the countryside. In this complicated period, Haley’s comet appears over the sky, considered an omen by the villagers. Ernesto’s family decides to leave Jalco and move to the city. Gustavo leaves first.
Part 1 Analysis
The opening line of Barrio Boy establishes that Ernesto Galarza was born into a different world. He writes, “unlike people who are born in hospitals, in an ambulance, or in a taxicab” (25), he was born in a small cottage. The remoteness of the village is emphasized as he describes how first-class travel is by mule, while tourist class is by burro, or donkey. The village has no priest, mayor, sheriff, jail, or judge. In Ernesto’s telling, the town almost seems to exist outside of time. He writes of his house, “Who had built and designed and made all this nobody knew. We had just moved in; if we ever moved out it would all be left as it was, soaped and scrubbed to look and smell clean” (39).
Jalco is a small place where the rhythms of the day are regular and predictable. When the men and boys arrive home after work, for example, they walk down the street to go to their cottages and “everyone knew when this would happen—almost to the minute” (35). The scene is always the same: The doors of the cottages are open as the women and girls prepare dinner (tortillas, beans, coffee), the houses lit by candles and coal. To Ernesto, the world of his childhood is rich and exciting. Galarza recalls eavesdropping on adults who said that “nothing ever happens in Jalcocotán” (52), which doesn’t make sense to Ernesto as he sees important things happen every day. Galarza repeats words and descriptions to highlight the predictability of the village.
To situate the reader in the world he grew up in, Galarza uses descriptive language. For example, he describes “the huge umbrellas of the elms, and the shaggy cedars,” while the “pine kindling was marvelously aromatic and sticky” (28). The “songs and colors” of the forest include “flocks of parakeets, macaws, and loros that chattered and squeaked on the fringe of the forest; in flight over the house, they sounded like little rusty hinges” (28). The landscape is also vividly described: “a rose and purple mist nearly always lingered after sunset,” and the water is “cold, transparent, and greenish blue” (34), while “the eastern slopes of the range became patches of black-blue” (34). In addition to the landscape, he describes the day-to-day rhythms of Jalco, where women wash clothes in ponds, men chop driftwood, and people prepare supper at dusk. This is a world he can recall with remarkable detail from memory, and every scene has ample description.
The setting functions as a character. For example, Galarza describes the arroyo, or creek, at length. The arroyo is an actor in his narrative, and he uses active verbs to indicate this. For instance, “it brought driftwood downstream and delivered it to the jalcocotecanos who chopped it into kindling. It supplied the pond with fish” (34). The words “brought,” “delivered,” and “supplied” imply agency and position the natural world as an important force in the lives of the villagers.
Memory is an important theme in the book. Galarza writes in a conversational style that is based on his recollections. He identifies the moment when “he began to have a memory” between the age of three and five (45). His earliest memories are “the forest trail, the street, the zopilotes, the arroyo, my mother’s potted garden, the summer showers, José whistling an imitation of a song bird” (45). Part 1 recreates the world of his childhood, but he includes details that he wouldn’t have known as a child, such as backstory about the town and his family. He consciously invokes the worldview of a child, reflecting that when looking at tin portraits (daguerreotypes) of family members, “it astounded me that my grandparents could have been so diminutive as to fit into a metal tab, two inches by three” (45). Objects like photographs function as devices of memory, and they link Galarza to the past beyond his own experiences in childhood.
The chapter structure echoes the non-linear form of memory. It begins with the town and then moves through a series of interconnected but non-linear recollections about his childhood. Some memories are more specific, such as a hurricane, but largely, the earlier stories are things that would be interesting to a child, such as preparing and eating food and playing with the animals in the town. As the chapter progresses and Ernesto grows older, the incidents become more specific. For example, the coming of the Mexican Revolution and his family’s decision to leave is told in considerable detail.
