Besides his public life as an administrator of the University of California, Riverside, Tomás Rivera was well known in literary circles as a writer of prose and poetry. Although he published only two books and some scattered poems, short stories, and literary essays and left parts of an unpublished second novel, he was able to influence greatly the trend that Chicano literature was to take during the 1970s and into the 1980s. His most important work, "... y no se lo tragó la tierra"/"... and the Earth Did Not Part," a novel composed of short narratives, was awarded the Premio Quinto Sol in 1970 and published in 1971. Critics have praised the novel for its original structure, its terse style, and its faithful presentation of life among Chicano migrant workers. Less well known is his collection Always and Other Poems (1973), in which there is the same faith in...