Ron Arias

Ron Arias
Born Ronald Francis Arias
(1941-11-30) November 30, 1941
Los Angeles, California
Occupation novelist, journalist
Nationality US
Genre novel, memoir
Notable works The Road to Tamazunchale (1975)
Moving Target (2002)
Notable awards National Book Award (nominated)
Spouse Joan
Children 1

Literature portal

Ron Arias (born November 30, 1941) is a former senior writer and correspondent for People magazine and People en Español. He is also a highly regarded Chicano writer whose novel The Road to Tamazunchale has been called "one of the founding texts in Contemporary Chicano/a Literature."[1]

Biography

Early life

Arias is a native of Los Angeles, California. He attended Stuttgart American High School in Ludwigsburg, Germany. His university education includes Oceanside-Carlsbad Community College, Universidad de Barcelona, UC Berkeley, Universidad de Buenos Aires (where he studied Middle English under Jorge Luis Borges), and UCLA where he received a bachelor's degree in Spanish and a master's degree in journalism.[2]

Arias served in Andean Peru as a Peace Corps volunteer, and some of his experiences in the Andes inspired his novel, Road. Another influence on his decision to become a journalist was his search to learn why his father withdrew from the family after the Korean War. He spent 30 years as a journalist, 22 of them at People. He has also worked for Caracas Daily Journal, the Buenos Aires Herald, and contributed stories and columns to The New York Times, Revista Chicano/Riqueña, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Times.[3] After retiring from magazine journalism in 2007, Arias taught biography-writing at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

Literary work

Arias has been called "a post-modernist who integrates in his fiction a keen eye for actual Mexican-American experience."[4] His work is influenced by twentieth-century Latin American literature.[5] Arias focuses on urban Chicano life, especially "the struggle between imagination and rationalism and the transcendent possibilities of ethnic pluralism."[4]

His best known work is The Road to Tamazunchale, for which there are around 20 critical studies listed at the MLA database. 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.[6]

Journalism

Arias worked for People magazine from 1985 until 2007, and has become known both his interviews with famous people and for his coverage of major disasters all over the world. He says that he is "the magazine’s ‘parachute journalist.’On every continent, I covered five wars, famine, earthquakes, hurricanes, all kinds of disasters in Haiti, Somalia, Ethiopia, Australia, Vietnam, Moscow, you name it."[2] His first major disaster article was the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which he was assigned simply because he was the only staff member who speaks Spanish.[2]

Marriage and children

Arias' only child is filmmaker Michael Arias, currently residing in Tokyo, Japan.

The Road to Tamazunchale

This novel depicts the last days of Fausto Tejado, 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. 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".

Published works

Awards

See also

References

  1. ↑ UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
  2. 1 2 3 CSU Dominguez Hill article on Arias (accessed March 2008)
  3. ↑ Manuel Villar Raso and María Herrera-Sobek, "A Spanish Novelist's Perspective on Chicano/a Literature" Journal of Modern Literature 25.1 (2001) 17-34
  4. 1 2 DLB entry at BookRags.com
  5. ↑ Latino Fiction Literature Analysis Chapter 2 Part 1
  6. ↑ Luis Leal and Manuel M. Martin-Rodríguez, "Chicano Literature." The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature Ed. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker. p.573.

Notes/Further reading

External links

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