ERNESTO GALARZA Biography - Activists, Revolutionaries and other freedom fighters

 
 

Biography » activists revolutionaries and other freedom fighters » ernesto galarza

ERNESTO GALARZA

Name: Ernesto Galarza                                                               
Born: 7 August 1905                                                                 
Died: 22 June 1984                                                                 
                                                                                   
In Ernesto Galarza there is a confluence of lyric poet, labor organizer, veteran   
educator, international economist, and renowned scholar. Although best known as     
"the loudest and, surely, most unusual of the voices that have been raised to       
demand economic and social justice for the farm worker," Galarza's fictional       
autobiography, Barrio Boy (1971), won him wide critical acclaim as a writer and     
a storyteller, and a special place in Chicano letters. A must in every anthology   
of Mexican-American writing, excerpts of this work have also appeared in           
increasing numbers of English language readers in public schools across the         
nation.                                                                             
                                                                                   
Galarza was born 7 August 1905 to Henriqueta and Ernesto Galarza, Sr. Henriqueta   
went to live among relatives in Jalcocotán, a village of western Mexico, just     
weeks before the author's birth. The village in which Galarza spent the first       
years of his life is brilliantly evoked in Barrio Boy: "Crosswise, it was about     
wide enough to park six automobiles hub to hub.