SOURCE: “Gary Soto,” in Updating the Literary West, Texas Christian University Press, 1997, pp. 426-33.

In the following essay, Ganz provides a brief overview of Soto's life and work.

In the early 1950s Fresno, California, was an arid and grimy city of 91,000 inhabitants. Many were caught in an economic chokehold that relegated them to a lifetime of punishing labor in the cotton field, the orchard and vineyard or the small factory. African American, “Okie,” Chicano and Asian American families populated Fresno's blue-collar neighborhoods and by this time the racism of the thirties and forties had given way to a kind of mutual acceptance, born of the daily necessity of working together and by their shared “culture of poverty.” Every weekday residents of Fresno's barrios and other inner-city neighborhoods would pile aboard trucks and buses that transported them to the lush and fertile farmland of the San Joaquin Valley that...