Junior High Confidential: The Young Literary Reviewer Looks at "Across the Tracks"

Reading old journals offers endless pleasures. I found my inner literary critic at an early age, and I especially wrote about books that touched on the world around me. In the early 1970s, tales of vampires and werewolves and Hunger Games were decades in the future. Social realism attracted me. From September 18, 1971, at Mission Junior High School in Texas. I was 13 years old and had just started the 8th grade:

Finally, yesterday 2nd period, Mrs. Smith let us go to the library. I checked out a book, a paperback, that I noticed but never got around to reading. It's called "Across the Tracks," about this senior at a high school in South. Cal, Betty Ochoa, who wants to: 1) be accepted by the top social group at school (the Anglos) 2) help the tough, bitter gang leader, Pete Flores, before he gets killed. 3) she wants to bring gringo and chicano together. Though it has some faults (the author can't go a page without having Betty  blush) + everyone's always hugging each other, it's interesting because, with only a few alterations, it could be Mission.

What to make of this? Even then I noted other books with similar themes of Anglo-Hispanic (today's terms of choice) conflict. Everything seemed to set in California, Texas didn't get much ink as far as I could tell, and what books did cover South Texas were of the Anglo-focused triumphalist sort. More realistic views of interactions in Texas now exist and I've read them, through the novels of Rolando Hinojosa, set in an imaginary landscape of South Texas. I tried to find out more about Across the Tracks, but online searching turned up nothing about this book that so caught the life swirling around me in my small town.

One of these days I hope to make my own contribution to the genre of life along the tracks of Mission, Texas.