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...