Westward Eden

What a storyline. Young gifted Chicano nerds taking their first bold steps outside of the classroom—to be heroes! Yeah, that’s right. It’s the early 60s and they don’t what’s bad is until they stuck out their necks for a girl they didn’t know squat. Basic line here: these Chicano nerds put on their “White Knight” caps and went out of their way to help a white girl escape from her nutcase dad. By doing so, they stirred up a thunderstorm of a commotion. Racial tension exploded within their community as mobs combed the hillsides in searching for these boys and “rescuing” the girl. But what the story finally revealed is that true heroism is a sacrifice and honor is sometime too expense to earn—especially for teenagers.

Just finish reading “Westward Eden” by Joaquin Batista, and I found it haunting. I am a reader of Hispanic literature and this book runs contrary to the genre. Authors such as Rudoflo Anaya, Ernesto Galarza, Julia Alvarez, Jose Antonio Villareal, and others have earned their place in Chicano Literature history. But does Joaquin Batista deserve to be standing alongside these eminent Latino writers? The answer is YES. To be fair, Westward Eden has nothing to with poverty or hard luck experiences in the labor fields of America. No tin-roof shacks or vistas of endless agriculture fields, punctuated with cries of despair and joys of conquest over injustice. What the book has is the triumph over the acquiescence of the spirit. Four gifted Chicano boys from a middle school in Sonoma County CA decided to break the norm of conduct, relegated to their status as gifted nerds, and went for broke, in escorting a trouble white girl, in secret, to be with her mother. But these privilege boys quickly found that their daring deed merit the ire of those who saw their act as blasphemous to the social and racial order of their community. Mobs were quickly whip up and set loose in the countryside, on a rescue and search-and-destroy mission: rescue the girl and lose the boys! But what concluded by the end of the book was that intelligence, compassion, bravery, and finally, sacrifice, were the coins of the realm where true heroes are made from.

For starters, I read only westerns. A buddy of mine told me that this book called Westward Eden was the book for me: a bunch of Chicano kids rescuing a white girl? I quickly said no-way. But he does know me well enough that I can trust him to know what he’s talking about. So, I said, OK. Western Eden started off smoothly enough and then it got interesting. I mean, really interesting. I couldn’t put it down. In other words, I read the whole book none stop. In westerns, the hero is always tough, confident and loaded for bear. After finishing this book, I found out that true courage isn’t about how tough you are, or how game you are, nor that you are able to face off over a dozen guns and go down laughing. No, true courage is about strife and sacrifice, not only confronting them, but enduring them, willingly. In a society that sees people as props to be used and abused, these Chicano middle school kids saw that the right thing to do is the only thing worth doing in life. It is a coming of age story that is like being born, out of pain. And is in some way, it’s like that of a classic western story: no one gets out of life alive. In this case, pre-teens.