If you have not seen the movie, go and see the movie. Koerner Reserve section. And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him (1995).

As one of many class members who struggled a bit with the fact that this already obscure and abstract text was written in another language, I benefited greatly from seeing the movie. It really helped to tie things up for me and assured me I was on the right track… that I understood the novel properly. The movie remains fairly faithful to the novel, as much as is possible anyway, due to the abstract and disjointed nature of the text. The vignettes are more chronological in order and the story is slightly more focused on the perspective of Marcos, the young boy, than the Mexican American workers on the whole. The feeling you get from watching the movie, however, and the general expressive purpose are both very true to those intended by Rivera in the novel. The plight of the oppressed Chicano is very well presented and the injustice and hypocrisy of the entire situation are brought to the forefront.

One of the moments that struck me the most, in both the book and movie, was when the young boy points out in frustration that the Mexican Americans are always saying “when we arrive… when we arrive… ” (104) and yet they never really arrive. They are a displaced peoples. They have no true home, no true identity, no place to which they ever feel they properly belong. Their lives are a constant struggle, a constant frustration as they live on the oppressive terms of others.

I feel as though the young boy, called Marcos in the movie, is so very insightful for a child. And I think it definitely has to do with the hardships he has endured at such a young age. The discrimination he has faced and the injustice he has encountered have made him old before his time. The child has seen so much and suffered so intensely that terrifying entities such as God and the devil don’t incite the same kind of daunting, immobilizing fear in him as they do in the average child. He has the nerve to call the devil and to declare that there is no God to his devout Catholic mother. The child is truly remarkable and his harrowing life experiences have shaped him to be the introspective, inquisitive young soul that he is by the end of the novel.