What is the setting of Rain of Gold by Victor Villasenor?

The initial events of the book take place in two areas of Mexico. One, the La Lluvia de Oro, or, Rain of Gold, is a beautiful, pristine, box canyon high in north central Mexico. The people of the canyon are initially poor, but pictured as happy and contented with their plight in life. The development of the gold mine begins to change their environment, and, thus, their way of life. The beauty begins to leave in place of concrete building, barbed wire fences, and tremendous noise caused by the mining processes.

The people begin to flee the area when the bandits begin to set fire to the village. Most

Head for the relative safety and security they assume they will find in the United States.

The other opening setting is in the high mountains north of Mexico City. Three bothers discover an area where they wish to begin a community that is safe and isolated from the poverty and insecurity of the larger cities. As with the other village in the opening pages of the story, it is beautiful and relatively untouched by civilization when the community is founded. It is also vacated when the area is over run by bandits who burn the buildings, kill many of the inhabitants, and steal or kill their livestock.

The squalor of Ciudad Juarez is seen and contrasted to what it was like just three years prior to the Revolution. The relative serenity and beauty of the area has gone as thousands and thousands of poor people trying to get to the United States have ended up there with no jobs, money, food, and no shelter to speak of. The ease of crossing the Rio Grande into the country they see as their salvation has disappeared, and most wait in horrible conditions.

The farming communities of Southern California, however, offer a better chance at salvation, even though the environment appears to many as another hopeless struggle for betterment. People live in houses, have transportation, and their jobs provide them with fruit and vegetables and some other comforts. While many are not able to take advantage of some of the methods to better themselves, there is more education available than there had been in the rural communities of Mexico, and they are free from the raids of the bandits they were used to in Mexico.