Living Up The Street

Gary Soto’s Living Up the Street, published in 1985, is a nonfiction coming-of-age tale depicting Soto’s life growing up in Fresno, California. Although the intended audience is young adults, it deals with the universal themes of love, friendship, and family. Soto’s work is told as a series of stand-alone short stories that function as vignettes of his early and young adult life.

While the short stories can be read independently, they follow a linear timeline of Soto’s life, which his struggles with poverty and identity link. Soto’s grandmother first came to the United States after the Mexican revolution. She worked in the fields and in various Fresno factories, and Soto’s parents did the same. Although Soto’s parents were born in the United States, they followed in the footsteps of their parents by working in the fields and factories. As a result, Soto views being poor and doing hard physical labor as characteristics of being Mexican, and he constantly struggles with what it means for him to be Chicano, American with Mexican roots.

The individual stories in the first half of the book focus on Soto’s childhood, while the stories in the second half center on his young adult life. While these stories provide glimpses into Soto’s life, they function as the tip of the iceberg in that they often don’t provide background details, leaving the reader to infer what’s underneath. For example, the reader finds out that Soto’s father dies when he’s young and he ends up having a bad relationship with his stepfather, but the details of those events aren’t given. The reader later finds out that Soto marries a woman named Carolyn and has a daughter, but the reader again doesn’t know the details of how those events happened. In this way, the short stories serve as vignettes of Soto’s experiences rather than giving a full picture of his life.

Although Soto is the first-person narrator of his own story, he often doesn’t talk about his feelings. Instead, he relies on the actions in each story to reveal his feelings about certain events. This is most dramatically realized after Soto’s father dies. He doesn’t talk about being sad, yet he details how his relatives hovered around him, making him feel unable to hide. In this situation, like many others, the reader is left to infer many things about Soto’s life and his feelings regarding certain events.