And The Earth Did Not Devour Him

And the Earth Did Not Devour Him presents a portrait of a community that has been marginalized. By telling the migrant workers’ stories, through his experience within the community, the narrator pulls them away from the margins and into the center of American experience. They are no longer a voiceless and stereotyped collective at the fringes but complex and fully realized individuals who interact with and experience a full range of human emotions. Vignette 13 most explicitly illustrates this through the poet Bartolo who, like the book’s narrator, gives voice to the migrant workers’ experiences. In Bartolo’s case, “voice” is literal: He urges residents to read his poems aloud. However, his statement that the “spoken word” is “the seed of love in the darkness” can be understood more generally as expressing the importance of being seen and heard (138). Sharing the migrants’ experiences disrupts easy but false generalizations and stereotyping, whether romanticized or demonized. Some of the characters are loving people who become victims of their circumstances, like Don Efraín, and Doña Chona. Some vigorously resist their exploitation, like Don Mateo. Some are sinister, like