The biggest failure of many ethnic and minority-group writers is that their political viewpoints often turn them into moralizing zealots or righteous cultural revolutionaries…. Chicano poet Gary Soto, a former fieldhand in the San Joaquin Valley, manages to avoid such shortcomings in The Elements of San Joaquin and thereby establishes that he is considerably more than just a good ethnic writer; he is a good poet. (p. 73)

Soto's topics extend beyond the fields and farms into all aspects of migrant life in the valley—the charity hospitals, the barbershops, the streets and alleys—and he depicts them all in a Gary Soto 1952– Photograph by Carolyn, reproduced by permission of University of Pittsburgh Presslean, simple style. And although Soto is capable of mimicking the mannerisms of uneducated Chicanos in a straightforward, uncomplicated style, his verses are not unintellectual. His simplicity is merely a stylistic device, one appropriately suited...